Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume15

Novel Illustrations

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Prologue: Starting Point – Girl_and_Girl!

It was January 9, just past 4 PM.

In District 23 after school. Specifically, in the international airport lobby. The place felt unusually spacious, not because the long break had ended and the crowds had vanished, but because the place had only just reopened after the recent trouble.

There now was the pointy haired high school boy named Kamijou Touma, feeling at his wits’ end.

He had run across someone whose presence could only mean trouble.

And not just one. There were two of them.

“Why are you two in Japan?”

The black-haired girl in a lacrosse-like miniskirt outfit was Lessar of N∴L∴, aka New Light.

The blonde girl armed with a blouse and skirt colored like a classy piano was Leivinia Birdway of the Dawn-Colored Sunlight.

They were both magicians belonging to famous(?) magic cabals in the United Kingdom. More than that, Birdway looked no older than 12, but she sat in the boss’s seat of the UK’s largest magic cabal. …And whether his experiences with them had been unlucky or they were just like that, Kamijou sensed a great threat to any possibility of a peaceful life in his immediate future. It was like they came from the world of a foreign gangster movie.

When faced with these people from a world he wanted no part of, what could a peaceful boy do but shout?

“What is Japanese customs doing!? You can’t let people like this in the country! For world peace reasons!!”

“Hey, don’t talk about us like we’re luggage. The word you’re looking for is immigration.”

“People like this, huh? (lol) And, well, he’s right that it’s a foreign affairs matter. But in either case, you’re talking about government officials from outside the city, so they can’t do much about anything happening in the city walls. Oh, my. Does this mean we’re free to exploit some loopholes even more dangerous than those in a young wife’s sexy lingerie?☆”

Lessar cackled.

…The border patrol at the city wall was supposed to be working hard each day to keep dangerous people like this out, but what was with this weird mixture of the two? If they landed in the airport already inside Academy City’s walls, did they get to skip that check altogether? What was even going on in this city?

“Also, do you see the UK’s Union Jack over there?”

Leivinia Birdway jerked her thumb over toward the tempered glass forming one of the walls. Several airplanes of various sizes were visible on the vast tarmac and one of them did indeed have a national flag drawn on its tail fin.

The small airplane looked like a personal plane or charter jet. Yes, the kind you occasionally saw in movies and was referred to as a business jet. …Kamijou wouldn’t have thought he had the time during the New Year’s holiday what with him dying and coming back to life, so he was surprised to realize he had actually watched a movie on TV.

“It’s called a government plane. We’re lending a hand in picking up a criminal being extradited to the UK. …Damn those Anglicans, they only sent the invitation to me as an individual, so all my other people had to stay behind in London.”

Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen any of those people in tuxedos (tailcoats?) who looked like they were dressed for a party (but didn’t look like the party-going type).

Birdway pointed to Lessar, looking less than amused.

“So she’s here as my bodyguard. If I’m so much as scratched, Mark and the others will surround her and ‘thank’ her once we get back, so feel free to boss that weakling around all you like.”

“Yeah, well, my stance is to do whatever I can for the UK, whether its good or bad, but I have my doubts that babysitting this unruly child will help our country all that much.”

Apparently that was the deal with them.

It did make sense.

…But at the same time Kamijou seriously doubted that was all there was to it. His wild experiences in the past told him otherwise.

“You really aren’t plotting anything? You didn’t bring anything dangerous into Academy City because the inspections are lax for personal planes, did you? No, I can see it already! You brought some British magician with a weird mummy or golden mask and Academy City is going to be on the brink of destruction yet again!!”

“Fine. I turned my back on the sunlit world to dedicate myself to studying magic, so if you want to target me with an unfair witch hunt, so be it.”

“?”

Lessar carefully presses her palms against a nearby glass wall.

The short black-haired girl had a huge grin on her face.

She stuck her little butt out toward Kamijou with no concern at all for her short skirt and raised her voice.

With her fake devil tail swishing side to side.

“I’m willing to prove my innocence. Bring on the lewd body search!!”

“To be clear, I’m just going to ignore this kind of nonsense this time around, okay?”

The world seemed to darken before Kamijou’s eyes.

Why was this happening?

To answer that complex and bizarre mystery, we must first find the initial cause!

Chapter 1: A Deadly Misunderstanding – New_Weapon_ZONE.

Part 1

Hamazura Shiage was trapped.

He was inside a small, cramped silver box.

According to his phone’s broken screen, it was just before 4 PM on January 9.

The space was a die-like cube with two or three meter sides. It was probably no more than a cargo container with a lock attached so it would function as a prisoner transfer cell. Transporting humans like cargo was in violation of aviation law and international law, but Hamazura had apparently been arrested by the British government(?). When treaties between nations were involved, apparently the rules could be easily bent.

Justice was cheap.

From individuals to entire populations, interpretations of it were easily changed by circumstances and convenience. In light of that, Coronzon trying to destroy the world based on the vague ideas of good and evil didn’t seem all that bad.

…Or maybe that was why. Coronzon had taken the side of evil, which had allowed her to accurately sniff out the deception. Had she wanted to stabilize the world by focusing on an absolute value system that existed separate from good and evil?

But more people than she had expected had rejected that.

Maybe Coronzon really had been a great demon.

But the world was aflood with small evils, wasn’t it? When brought together, there may have been enough to kill and surpass a great demon.

“Kh.”

He held a cheap smartphone with a broken screen.

That small device contained the AI named Aneri.

He wasn’t just a Level 0.

So no longer could he use his lack of power and talent as an excuse to ignore the choice to fight.

He must have been angry.

He must have felt it was unforgivable.

…His feelings were directed at the entire world that hadn’t hesitated to kill Coronzon to reclaim balance.

A trump card had undeniably found its way into Hamazura’s hand. He knew that. How he made use of this one-time-only opportunity would greatly change what happened afterwards. He could sense that he stood at a crossroads.

He couldn’t bring himself to accept something here.

They had called Coronzon a great demon, ganged up on her to attack as a group, and celebrated a world without her. They had rejoiced the return of a peaceful age. Maybe no one getting hurt was a good thing, but that didn’t mean he could fully accept what had happened.

(But…)

He hung his head.

Aneri was waiting. Like a well-trained butler or maid. If he gave the word – if he relied on Aneri – it would likely do anything for him. It wouldn’t hesitate even if that meant breaking Japan’s laws or Academy City’s rules.

However.

That was the thing.

Going on a meaningless rampage to break everything around him wouldn’t satisfy him. This couldn’t be solved by indiscriminately attacking innocent people.

He hated this world.

But he had a feeling that method wouldn’t satisfy him.

Coronzon had tried to create a better world.

A new world filled with just, kind, and beautiful things.

Her methods may have been extreme, but ultimately she had loved this ridiculous and imperfect world. So taking the easy and indiscriminate path of evil felt wrong here.

(Then what exactly do I want to do with this world? I have a reason to change it and I’ve been given the power to do that…but what exactly should I do with Aneri? What the hell would be best to honor Coronzon’s memory!?)

So to make it very clear, Hamazura Shiage had not actually arrived at a decision. Without a goal in mind, he hadn’t had any intention of ordering AI Aneri to do anything.

And yet…

Clatter clatter.

The delinquent boy heard a sound.

A weird sound that had no connection to his own will.

The tightly locked cell door suddenly opened. More specifically, the metal shutter for the die-shaped air cargo container opened straight up.

But no one was there.

All he saw outside the cell was what appeared to be an indoor space awash with artificial light.

Hamazura stared past the steel door he hadn’t asked to open into the visible slice of a bright world and asked a question.

“Aneri, did you do that?”

His phone buzzed twice. As if shaking its head no.

Apparently Aneri hadn’t done anything.

…Then why had this happened? This cubic container had been modified into a cell, so it would never open all on its own. Or had the Brits in charge of the cell opened it on purpose? Were they itching to shoot him dead as a fugitive once he took even one step outside?

“No, I must be overthinking this…” he told himself.

Yes. Going that far was overthinking it, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t afraid. Coincidence or not, he knew thoughtlessly leaving the cell would only exacerbate his situation.

The question wasn’t where he would go. It was why he would leave.

“…”

He needed a goal.

What could he do for Coronzon?

Even with Aneri, he shouldn’t make any kind of move without a goal in mind.

(Will they blame me for this too? Damn, what a pain. Well, I know those ‘righteous heroes’ are conspiring to get me found guilty, so what’s another charge or two?)

That offhand line of thought was interrupted.

“Wah!!”

He heard a dull whump.

In the container yard where ordinary travelers weren’t allowed.

Was she lost?

A small girl of around 13 had tripped and fallen just outside the open door. She must have been wearing an adult size because the sleeves fully hid her hands and it came down to her ankles, making it hard to balance. The chestnut-haired girl wore a fluffy oversized coat.

But she didn’t complain of the pain or start crying.

She didn’t even get back up as she stared at a certain point.

The girl’s terrified eyes weren’t directed inside the open cell. She was looking at something Hamazura couldn’t see from his position.

The clacking noises he heard clearly weren’t human footsteps.

“N-no… Help.”

It slowly approached the trembling and frozen girl.

Hamazura could finally see it.

Was it a police dog, or a more specialized drug-sniffing dog? Either way, one of the large Dobermanns used for airport security was wandering around off its leash. And it wasn’t alone. There were five of them. At that point, they were a pack of wild animals.

To make matters worse, the girl’s baggy sleeves were shaking.

Fear wasn’t something you could suppress through sheer force of will. But when those trained dogs saw the “threat” of her moving arms, they would react by biting at them and dragging her to the floor. A thoroughly trained Dobermann’s jaws could cause critical damage to that small girl’s thin arms.

Hamazura was certain of it after being chased by Anti-Skill dogs through Academy City’s back alleys.

He knew all too well what would happen if no one intervened.

And he had encountered the situation a second before it happened.

…It was time to decide what was good and what was evil.

The question wasn’t whether or not the metal shutter was open.

If he was going to obey the rules, then staying in the cell was unquestionably the correct choice.

No additional circumstances changed the fact that Hamazura Shiage was a criminal and the rules said he couldn’t leave this cell without permission from Academy City or the United Kingdom who had custody of him.

Even if a Dobermann’s sharp fangs sank into the 13-year-old girl’s arm and dragged her to the floor and even if the pack of dogs tore her to pieces like she was an old rag. Even then, the correct choice was to stay put and wait until whoever was in charge showed up.

That would prove he was a rule follower, the world managed by justice would gradually accept him once more, his crimes would be forgiven to an extent, and he would be able to return to society sooner.

He would be able to live as one more harmless and heartless “good person”.

“To hell with that.”

A dull “thunk!!” sounded.

The source came from within the open cell. Hamazura Shiage had thrown his phone, scoring a direct hit on the Dobermann’s face. It probably goes without saying at this point, but if you weren’t afraid of bricking it, a smartphone made for a decently heavy and solid weapon. They weren’t compared to bricks for no reason.

For a brief moment, they flinched.

Not just the muscular Dobermanns, but the scared and trembling girl as well.

Hamazura slowly emerged from the cubic cell.

After being rejected by society and living in the filthy back alleys, he knew flinching like this would freeze an opponent in place like they were paralyzed, but it wouldn’t last forever. If you actually wanted to save someone and not just put on a tear-jerking performance, a single blow wasn’t enough.

So…

“Go.”

He kept it short.

And he moved to stand between the Dobermanns and the girl whose name he didn’t know.

“Hurry.”

He heard an “au” sound that could have been a word or a breath.

Her staggering escape was unsteady. He could have caught up to her at a brisk walk. For that matter, what was she even running from? The pack of large dogs, or the dangerous criminal who had emerged from the cell?

(As if it matters.)

She wouldn’t be mistaken if she thought of him as a villainous criminal.

He had lost all interest in what was “right”.

He didn’t want to amass good deeds so he could be known as a good person.

For that matter, these Dobermanns wandering the airport off their leashes weren’t even an absolute evil in his mind. This was all needless pain and violence. If the airport workers who managed the justice of this place had actually done their jobs, these dogs wouldn’t need to be disparaged as evil in the first place.

“…”

There was something there.

Hamazura felt a small but unpleasant stimulus deep in his mind.

Because this reminded him of Coronzon who had lamented that the world couldn’t function without someone like her to tear people’s bonds apart.

An electronic alarm sounded from a short distance away. From his phone lying on the floor.

Aneri was sending him a warning.

Just as his attention focused there, the Dobermanns made their move.

Maybe they weren’t even looking at him at all. It looked to him like their legs were trying to carry them toward the fleeing girl’s back.

He shouted to the cracked phone lying on the floor.

“Aneri!!”

→PK→→PGP←→KKPKT

The industrial LCD screens on the walls and pillars were all hacked at once.

(P and K I get, but G? And what is T? Throw maybe!?)

Whatever the case, he had the optimal answer.

He only had to memorize it and follow it.

It was less like gritting his teeth and duking it out with an enemy and more like playing an arcade dancing game. He moved his hands and feet as the instructions told him and found the powerful Dobermanns had already been brought to the floor.

It was refreshing how the dull impacts seemed to reach him only after the fact.

“Oh, sorry…”

The five Dobermanns had all been knocked out in just three seconds. That was less than a second per dog.

If only Coronzon had been stopped like this. If only someone had done that.

He knew it was a silly hypothetical, but still.

“…”

And he couldn’t forget that this was AI Aneri’s power, not his own.

“I get the feeling you’ll be overclocking my brain one of these days.”

He was answered by a short buzz.

He wasn’t sure how to react to a response of “Yes, shall I do so now?”

The immediate threat of the Dobermanns had been neutralized and the girl who had been unfortunately targeted had escaped. There was nothing else for him to do.

Returning to the die-like cell would be the right thing to do…probably.

He collected his phone from the floor and hid behind a different container.

Not even he was sure why he had done so.

The next change had already begun.

Part 2

“Kamijou-chaaaan, you really are going to be held back this time.”

The 135cm teacher named Tsukuyomi Komoe smiled at him.

Inside the faculty room after school.

Kamijou Touma was sweating profusely.

“Wow, congratulations. I’m so flattered you so wanted to spend more time studying with me that you would set your entire life back by a year.”

“Wait, wait, please wait!! Stop upping the scale of the problem here. I have a more grounded question I’d like to ask. I’m being held back? Like, that’s for sure? Then why did I even bother dying and coming back to life to protect the world!? It sure as hell wasn’t to have this happen!!”

“Try to confuse me all you like, Kamijou-chan, but I am a civil servant. Government jobs where paperwork is everything can be heartless, but you really won’t be able to avoid being held back if you don’t fix this immediately. Do you remember how you were officially considered dead and we even had a funeral for you?”

“Yeah, but I got the frog-faced doctor to confirm I’m alive!!”

“The document saying so never arrived here. What did you do with such an important document? Without that, I can’t count your attendance even if you are in class. We don’t run a ghost school where the dead are allowed to take classes.”

“But I sent it.”

“It never arrived.”

“I stuck it in one of those big document envelopes, covered it in stamps, and shoved it inside the mailbox!!”

“And I’m telling you it never arrived. Also, you shouldn’t cram one of those thick document envelopes inside the red mailboxes on the side of the road. You’re supposed to drop it off at the post office.”

…Did this mean what he thought it did?

Kamijou had sent the important document, but it had gotten lost during the delivery process and never arrived at the school?

“H-how am I even supposed to find it now? Ahhhh, why don’t they let you search for the GPS location of your delivery like they do with packages from online stores.”

He had had a bad feeling about it from the moment he learned it was a paper document. Ever since smartphones became the norm, physical documents began to feel weird. When he could have submitted it online in seconds, why did they still use such an outdated system!? The government should really think more about the feelings of people who had just dealt with dying, journeying through hell, and coming back to life!!

But Komoe-sensei didn’t seem all that concerned.

“It’s probably in District 23, don’t you think?”

“Huh? That’s where the airport and rocket launch pads are, right? Why would it be there?”

“Because the most high tech cargo and mail management system is located there. And customs processing too. They have machines read the labels and automatically sort the mail, but I’ve heard any that can’t be read and get lost will end up in that district. Occasionally they keep trying to deliver one of my packages when I’m not home and I have to go pick it up there.”

Yes. That was why Kamijou Touma paid a visit to District 23 after school.

…Which leads back to him capturing two dangerous girls in the supposedly ultra safe international airport.

Part 3

“Tatemiya-san.”

“Yeah?”

Exceptionally large Tatemiya Saiji casually raised a hand to greet the small nun who wore special sandals with soles more than 20cm thick.

They were in the employees only area of the massive international airport.

Specifically, in the air cargo container yard.

“He got us good. I thought for sure he would wait until we were outside Academy City if he was going to try and escape…but maybe you can’t expect a fugitive to think rationally when they have nothing left to lose. We won’t be able to predict what he’ll do next.”

It only looked like a silver die with two or three meter sides at first glance, but it was in fact a cell made of the finest Anglican techniques. Even professional magicians like Tatemiya and Agnese weren’t confident they could escape on their own if they were locked inside…yet the metal shutter had easily been opened.

Agnese Sanctis put a hand on her hip.

“He’s just some high school boy led astray by Coronzon. …When I first heard about it, I thought witch hunt grade was overkill for the cell. I mean, the keyhole uses a twisted loop lock to keep it shut in a Möbius shape. Trying to break that would only be an endless waste of time.”

“And yet he managed to escape. Do you really think an ‘ordinary high schooler’ could do that?”

Tatemiya watched as Itsuwa, Nomozaki, and the other Amakusas slowly circled around the die-like container. They drew out a large circle on the floor with fine salt, erecting a barrier around the container.

They had intentionally made the barrier extremely weak.

Any trace of magic power would break the barrier, allowing them to detect its presence.

A reading here would at least tell them which direction he had fled in…but their hopes weren’t high.

Fleeing of his own free will meant Hamazura Shiage had no intention of receiving a fair trial. They had to assume he would act hostilely toward the Anglicans.

The question was what harm his negative emotions would lead to.

“I did what research I could into Hamazura Shiage after he sided with Coronzon, but he’s nothing special. Using science’s terms, he’s a Level 0, which means he can’t do anything on his own. And as a Level 0, the changes to his body prevent him from using magic. In that sense, he isn’t too much of a threat.”

“Do not underestimate Level 0s.”

The look on Agnese’s face said she knew a very obvious example of why that was a bad idea.

“Yeah, that’s the thing, isn’t it?”

Tatemiya sighed softly.

Although that pointy-haired boy was such an outlier he probably wasn’t a useful data point.

“The problem is, ultimately, Coronzon.”

“But she’s supposed to already be dead. …Are you suggesting he’s come down with Stockholm syndrome and is still trying to help her?”

“It’s worse than that.” Tatemiya readily rejected that idea. “It’s easy to overlook it since being a demon with a physical body made her an extreme exception, but on a fundamental level, angels and demons are collections of energy.”

“Sitra Achra.”

The material that was the root of all evil.

The remnants of the old world that remained in the current world which had supposedly been perfectly designed. Their very presence caused the world to malfunction and brought about all sorts of misfortune and tragedy.

Agnese had heard that Great Demon Coronzon herself had mentioned the term. Although then it had looked like a small crystal and she had used it like a stun grenade.

Tatemiya Saiji nodded.

“And Telesma can be infused within all forms of matter in the physical world. In talismans, amulets, clothing, magic circles, buildings…and even people.”

The tension in the air didn’t just come from Agnese.

She was a leader with nearly 250 former Catholics under her command. She had to avoid reacting too much and spreading excess confusion to the others.

So she asked a cautious question.

“You mean her Sitra Achra was imbued within Hamazura Shiage?”

“I don’t know.” Tatemiya shook his head. “After all, the records show this wasn’t his first contact with Coronzon. To be honest, I don’t think she had time for any extra detours with everything else going on in Academy City. Not to mention that the two of them could only have been in physical contact for about an hour.”

“But…”

“Yes, what if she had set this up back when they were together in the UK? That would change things.”

The analogy was far from perfect, but it was like hypnotism.

Once a long time had been spent setting things up in the target’s head, only a snap of the fingers was needed to produce the desired effect. In that case, any time restrictions were irrelevant.

Hamazura Shiage had spent a significant period of time with Great Demon Coronzon in England and Scotland. Not even the Anglicans knew what the two of them had discussed during that time. It was possible he had received something from her during that unobserved time.

And Hamazura himself might not have even been aware of it.

“If Coronzon’s Telesma – her Sitra Achra – was placed inside Hamazura Shiage, it changes the threat level considerably. He can’t fire Adikalika with only Coronzon’s power…but if he filled in some of the holes in his abilities, it could become possible.”

Espers couldn’t use magic.

…Or so they said, but it was more accurate to say the differences in espers’ bodies meant the process used to refine their life force into magic power would cause malfunctions and side effects that shredded their blood vessels and nerves.

So it wasn’t a sure thing.

With a separate energy source like Coronzon, he wouldn’t need to use his own life force at all. So the possibility remained that he could use a superhuman demon spell without any of the side effects.

Not to mention that, if Hamazura chose to self-destructively use a powerful piece of magic, he might be able to push past the side effects regardless.

That would lead to a world-destroying spell activating at the cost of a single boy’s life.

Agnese sighed.

“Even if he’s a Level 0, if an Academy City student launched an attack on the Vatican using Adikalika, we’d be right back where we were. No, it might actually be worse than when an outside force like Coronzon had hijacked the city.”

Sitra Achra acted like a computer virus you thought you had fully expunged from the system but returned after the recovery process was complete. They had defeated Coronzon themselves, but the threat of Adikalika persisted.

A continuous vague threat was not a good environment for diplomacy.

“That said…we did defeat Coronzon once. Even if Hamazura Shiage had received a portion of her power as Sitra Achra, he can’t be any worse than she was, can he?”

“Don’t be so sure.”

Agnese seemed to be trying to force a positive spin on the idea, but Tatemiya shot it down. In fact…

“That may have been Coronzon’s limit as a purely magical being, but Hamazura Shiage might have more knowledge of the science side than she did. He’s drawing on a different knowledge source. If the mixture of magic and science triggers some bizarre chemical reaction, his simple power ranking might not mean much.”

The sample size was too small to say anything for sure.

And Tatemiya wouldn’t be the only one who wanted to fill the blanks with pessimistic predictions as a defensive measure.

“Besides…it was practically a miracle we defeated Coronzon the first time around. How many different groups and plans do you think were at work that night? Are you confident we can intentionally gather all that around Kamijou Touma a second time?”

Think of it like summer homework. That had been the absolute peak of their ability, so their long-term plans would fall apart if they assumed that as the baseline.

They had to act on the assumption that wouldn’t happen again.

Agnese was also an outsider underling, so she must have caught the scent of some dirty work. She grimaced.

“Then we have to deal with the escaped prisoner…like that?”

“I doubt our Priestess will give that sort of order.”

That was just the kind of person the leader of the Amakusas was.

One look at Kanzaki Kaori’s Magic Name was enough to know she would never allow killing. The wicked were no exception there.

However.

Who said that was any reason to relax?

Tatemiya Saiji’s eyes were on another two standing a short distance away.

Stiyl Magnus and Isabella Theism.

Their atmosphere…no, their world was different.

“Those two are genuine Necessarius members. So they probably will order a witch hunt. …In other words, to kill him once we find him.”

Part 4

“Aneri, do you know what they’re talking about?”

The cracked phone buzzed twice.

Meaning no.

“I can’t tell either.”

Hamazura Shiage was in the container yard.

He was hiding behind a nearby container.

Who were those two? Nuns and street-style girls had joined them in a hurry. They appeared to be a mixture of ethnicities and nationalities.

At any rate, this told him what the UK’s policy was concerning him.

Kill him once we find him.

“…”

They seemed to think he was an unprecedented villain. Even though, since Aneri hadn’t done anything, he had no idea how the cell’s door had opened.

It didn’t look like they would be willing to hear what he had to say.

If he put his hands in the air and surrendered, he was pretty sure they would just put a bullet between his eyes.

(The material that acts as the root of all evil. Sitra Achra. Coronzon’s power, huh?)

He repeated the ideas in his head.

And then smiled self-deprecatingly.

(I’d appreciate it if I really was holding a special ticket like that…but this is the real world. A Level 0’s not gonna be given a convenient overpowered insta-win ability without even having to work for it. They’re reading too much into this.)

He was a thorn in their side. He could risk his life and he could rescue a stranger, but the arbiters of justice didn’t care. They could causally kill the “runaway criminal” with impunity and some VIP might even give them a medal for it. With a word of thanks for saving them the trouble of spending the people’s taxes on keeping him in prison.

He felt two vibrations in his hand.

Coming from his cracked phone. AI Aneri was asking for new instructions.

(If I surrender, they’ll just kill me. So what am I supposed to do?)

He didn’t have a goal in mind.

He had escaped the cell and was free to act once more, but what exactly could he do?

Go home?

Would he find a peaceful life there?

For that matter, was a peaceful life even what he really wanted?

He had to consider what it was he wanted.

…Yes, that’s right. He only wanted one thing: to figure out what he could do with his remaining life for Coronzon now that she had died. If he had any freedom at all, he needed to fight and search for that answer.

Part 5

She was eating curry.

Were all the people walking by on their way to or from one of the cooperative institutions? Among all the businessmen moving to and fro, Leivinia Birdway was eating beef curry in the international airport lounge.

Kamijou Touma couldn’t keep up with her.

“Why curry rice? Two dangerous people traveled all the way to Japan and something’s clearly about to happen, and you’re eating curry rice!?”

“It’s not my fault Japanese airports have great curry rice for some reason! And this is a Japanese specialty, just like sushi and tempura. You can’t find curry rice in India and you can search far and wide across Europe without finding this ‘European-style’ curry they only make in Japan!!”

Lessar was really into it too. She had ordered the seafood curry. She was making a valiant defense of her plate whenever Birdway’s spoon approached to steal some.

Did their government plane not serve an in-flight meal?

“Without Mark and the others with me, I need someone else at my beck and call. You can shirk that duty if you want, but if my fools decide you were rude to their cabal boss, you might just receive a ‘thank you visit’ from a group in black suits and sunglasses, so be careful.”

How could he react to that except to tremble?

…But why was it Kamijou’s duty to serve Birdway anyway? Hadn’t Lessar been sent with her for that kind of thing???

But then Lady Birdway’s face went blank.

And she spoke with her voice pitched horrifyingly low.

“If you don’t want to, that’s fine. I can always make do on my own. Hmm, I see how it is.”

“Eh? Wait, where did this terrifying atmosphere come from, Birdway-san? C-c’mon, stop puffing out your cheeks and pouting your lips and look at me. Now can you smile for me?”

“Don’t provoke her. If the boss of the infamous Dawn-Colored Sunlight decides to take this seriously and goes all out, this entire area will be reduced to rubble!”

“Wait!? But all the mail lost across Academy City is supposed to end up here in District 23. If you include the packages containing a single bar of soap people ordered online, that’s tens of thousands a day! If I have to search each building, room, shelf, and box for the document proving I’m alive, I’ll never find it. If I can’t check their giant computer for it, it’ll be lost forever, so don’t destroy it! My life will be overrrrrrrrrr!!”

“Hmph.”

The curry-eating girl wouldn’t look him in the eye, much less smile.

This meant she had more or less taken his future hostage! Thoughts raced through Kamijou’s mind. …Birdway and Lessar were essentially a pair of little bombs and he couldn’t afford to let them out of his sight. It would be best to stay with them until he had that document in his grasp.

Lessar cackled like this had nothing to do with her.

“By the way, Kamijou-san, where are your usual companions today? Y’know, the big-headed nun and the big-headed god.”

“Don’t let them hear you say that…”

“What, you want us to start keeping secrets just between the two of us? Welcome to the start of a sordid and immoral new life!!”

Kamijou had only come to District 23 because Komoe-sensei had suddenly given him the “held back” death sentence at school and he needed to get her to reconsider. He had come here directly after school without even stopping by his dorm where Index and Othinus were waiting.

With a look of dawning realization, the joking light vanished from Lessar’s eyes.

“…Wait, you mean this is a real opportunity?”

“Hey, those eyes are terrifying.”

Getting her to look after Birdway was looking like a far distant dream.

Birdway herself poked curiously some red fukujinzuke with her spoon as she spoke.

“So Hamazura Shiage, you say? Quite an interesting piece to appear on the board.”

She said it like she was enjoying rolling a piece of hard candy around in her mouth.

And with a thin smile.

She had met Hamazura before, hadn’t she? In Kamijou’s dorm and elsewhere.

…The name was beginning to gain some real significance for Kamijou as well.

Hamazura Shiage had witnessed the moment of Great Demon Coronzon’s death. In the shipyard containing a sliced drone carrier, he had shouted “wait”. And Kamijou hadn’t done so.

Kamijou had killed Coronzon to protect the world.

But what was the world for Hamazura?

“So he really was the criminal they were handing over. …What about him?”

“Well, he certainly is a threat. After all, he knows things about Coronzon no one else does. Maybe she was a cute, lonely, and pure girl. If he started spreading and disseminating information about Coronzon, she might start gaining supporters. No, in that case, it would be called proselytizing and evangelizing, wouldn’t it? Heh heh. For the Church of Coronzon, perhaps? You can see why the Anglicans are so on edge they built a special cell for him.”

“…Really?”

This was sharply diverging from his expectations.

The Church…of Coronzon?

Coronzon’s death had turned Hamazura into a threat. …Kamijou had assumed that was a scientific and physical issue like the possibility of him directly starting a firefight or setting off a bomb.

Birdway shrugged.

“You didn’t think killing Coronzon herself would immediately clean up all the problems she was spreading around, did you? A human’s influence on the world doesn’t vanish the instant they die. And here we’re talking about a great demon straight out of myth. It wouldn’t surprise me if her death actually caused her presence to grow. …And in every era, there is a subset of the population who are fed up with their lives. If those people start gathering around the banner of Coronzon, it could lead to an apocalyptic ideology spreading around the world. You can imagine the Anglicans and Academy City aren’t fond of that idea.”

“Are you sure? From a business standpoint, a global crisis seems like a great chance to win yourself some believers. Ha ha ha. The apocalypse is the ultimate opportunity!”

With her usual penchant for inappropriate comments, Lessar appeared to have $ signs in her eyes. But wait. Did they even use dollars in the UK?

“Hamazura Shiage took Coronzon’s side. That brought some very real disadvantages for him and got him treated as a criminal, but his psychological stance hasn’t changed. That makes him living proof that people can worship an absolute evil. If one person has done it, then there’s a chance more will as long as the conditions are right.”

There are no pure demons. “Demon” is a word people use when they want to deride the gods of people they dislike.

…According to Index, that had been Aleister’s theory.

Coronzon was known as a great demon, but based on that theory, she may have the traits necessary to draw people to her outside of a certain mythology.

The seeds planted in Hamazura were bad news whether he sowed them around or let them sprout within him.

In a way, they were even more dangerous than Adikalika or Dakshina Kalika.

Part 6

Hamazura Shiage gulped.

The row of metal detectors and luggage scanners were just like he had seen on TV and in movies.

“Kh.”

(Not good. I must be at the immigration gate for international flights.)

Security here would be tighter than anywhere else in the international airport. He would be in deadly trouble if he didn’t stop running around at random and actually memorize the airport’s layout. AI Aneri’s general stance was to help him with whatever he wanted to do, so it couldn’t sound the alarm at the stage of where he was going or what he was doing.

Still, this was bad. He had to get somewhere else fast.

He of course had no idea what exactly he would do after escaping. But for now he didn’t want to be caught and killed by those Brits.

What could he do for the late Coronzon?

The green light of an emergency exit caught his eye.

If only there was a door that let him escape his entire life.

An exit that would let him and his girlfriend Takitsubo escape danger and live on some distant tropical island.

“Wait!!”

A loud voice called to him from behind. A familiar girl’s voice.

“Kh.”

At times like this, someone he didn’t know might have been better.

Hamazura stiffly turned around and spoke, his voice scratchy.

“Dion…Fortune?”

“That’s right, Hamazura.”

The short girl accepted his gaze head on and nodded.

“Can you tell how dangerous a position you’ve put yourself in? No, sorry. You wouldn’t have done something so reckless if you could. Running away of all things was like offering up your head and asking to be killed. This country has the phrase about grasping at straws too, right? I know how you must feel, but you’re just running around without a clue where to go, aren’t you?”

He couldn’t answer.

She was right…but he wasn’t sure if he should let her know that.

“I can show you the way. I will act as your steady ship and solve all of this for you.”

“…But you’re with them. You’re one of those Englicans or whatever.”

“I am. And my point is I can protect you as the top of the Anglicans.”

“Protect me?”

“I am the leader of their organization. Their Archbishop. Maybe it’s just for show and only meant to be temporary, but I can use real authority for as long as I sit in that seat. That means I won’t let my many subordinates lay a finger on you. …If there’s anything you’re still uncertain of concerning Coronzon’s death, I can use all the Anglican Church’s resources to investigate it for you. Hamazura, do you have a better way of turning your vague dissatisfaction into a concrete goal?”

“…”

“Then come with me!! Leaving your cell and running around is like asking to be killed. And if you’re going to accomplish anything, you first need to make sure you’re safe. I can do that for you. You have me, Dion Fortune, as your trump card! Not the Anglicans or Academy City!”

Her reassuring words just about had him grab her outstretched hand.

Until he was interrupted by some ear-splitting beeping.

Coming from his cracked phone.

AI Aneri had triggered the maximum alarm.

Hamazura instinctually pulled his right hand back a little.

Fwoosh!!!

Immediately, something sharp shot by between him and Fortune. It looked like an arrow made of light.

And when he glanced over, he saw them.

It was hard to tell at first because they looked like the street type, but he was being watched by a malicious-eyed group keeping their distance. And it looked like they were ready to snipe him with…an esper power? Magic? Well, some kind of paranormal power that didn’t rely on guns.

A young woman with her black hair worn in a ponytail held her palm out toward him.

He was pretty sure she was with the Anglicans.

Was he just pure evil in their eyes? Dion Fortune must have been able to see his feelings rapidly drifting away from her because she shouted frantically to him.

“N-no, Hamazura! I don’t know what happened! I didn’t order them to do that!!”

“Sorry, Fortune…”

Dion Fortune wasn’t a bad person. He knew that much.

But he did not take her outstretched hand. Because he would be killed if he did.

The girl’s shocked expression was engraved into the back of his mind.

But he still said it.

“I’m through relying on justice’s claims of righteousness.”

Part 7

Hamazura Shiage had run away.

Dion Fortune watched him go.

With her untaken hand still held out in the empty air.

Even though he had once risked his life to save her when she had come apart into a deck of cards.

His actions here…made him an enemy of the Anglican Church, the member of the three great Christian sects that specialized in battling human magicians. It was a foolish, amateurish, and suicidal choice. A clever professional magician would have hidden any hostility they might have had.

In other words, Hamazura was not behaving like a professional.

So was he really the person the Anglican Church and its collection of professionals from around the globe should be pursuing?

What were they doing to one of the ordinary people they were meant to save?

(And on that note…)

Dion Fortune snapped at Kanzaki for acting without permission.

“What the hell are you people doing!? Have you forgotten I’m the Archbishop at the very top of the Anglican Church? I won’t let any of you kill Hamazura! I’ll use every last bit of my authority to ensure it!!”

“That’s the problem, though, isn’t it?”

The gloomy voice that interrupted belonged to Necromancer Isabella Theism.

Dion Fortune hadn’t been asking for opinions. Interrupting the Archbishop was itself disrespectful, but she didn’t seem to care.

“You’re going too far in supporting him. Who’s going to follow the orders of a leader who can’t keep an objective and impartial view thanks to her personal feelings? Especially among us Anglicans who protect the world from wicked magicians.”

“Wha-?”

“For that matter, aren’t you an original grimoire taking the form of tarot cards? You’re a Golden magician manufactured by Great Demon Coronzon herself. It wouldn’t surprise me if you had been manipulated to subconsciously support Hamazura Shiage…or rather, Coronzon’s remains.”

So she was bringing that up.

Dion Fortune’s thoughts were her own, but insisting so would be meaningless against someone who opposed her. Isabella knew that, so she sneered thinly. While watching her boss’s downfall.

It appeared Isabella wasn’t the only one to hold this opinion.

Despite the many people gathered here, not one of them moved to defend Fortune. In the end, was she nothing more than an outsider to them?

Stiyl Magnus glanced over at the “no smoking” sign on the wall and lit a new cigarette as he spoke.

“Influential members of the Royal Family and the Knights have been expressing concerns too. That means you no longer have the backing of the adults. …It’s time, Dion Fortune. You were put in place as a temporary figurehead to prevent chaos in the absence of an Archbishop after Lola Stuart’s downfall. I’ve heard you suggested the idea yourself and convinced Her Majesty the Queen. So you should make yourself scarce before you start causing chaos yourself.”

She had no interest in political power. She had known from the start she would eventually lose it.

But Hamazura Shiage was a different matter.

He was not a magician, so he shouldn’t be killed by the rules of the magic world. She couldn’t let these people give up on him for their own convenience like this.

She couldn’t as the Archbishop, even if she was an interim figurehead.

She couldn’t as one of the original Golden magicians who had laid the foundation of the magic system that existed to this day.

…And more than anything, she couldn’t as his friend.

So she scoffed.

“As if you could stop me, fool.”

“Then die.”

Stiyl didn’t hesitate to respond.

The place burst into motion.

Sister Lucia held a giant wooden wheel in front of her and it burst on its own. The sharp splinters formed a scattershot wall that rushed toward Dion Fortune. And bags of gold coins – which were heavier than hammers – used glowing wings to weave between the gaps of the splinters to fly toward Fortune’s head and solar plexus. Those were Angelene’s.

But she was unharmed.

Dion Fortune only had to hold out her right hand.

It held a black box.

“Translate, simplify, and create anew.”

It was swallowed up.

Both the wall of scattershot splinters and the flying coin bags.

“Archetype Processor. …I can’t believe you would try to take me on with ordinary magic without any kind of twist to it. Don’t underestimate an original member of the Golden cabal, little girls!!”

Crash!!

When the lid reopened on its own, filthy mud rushed out as if from a hose. And this mud contained a mountain of metal shards the size of guitar picks that would strip the flesh from the bone of anyone it touched. If Kanzaki hadn’t laid out countless wires to set up a barrier, that is exactly what would have happened.

(Honestly, why couldn’t you direct that tear-jerking spirit of charity toward the amateur lamb who was manipulated by a great demon without any knowledge of the magic world?)

If they couldn’t manage that, Dion Fortune would have to beat them down and confiscate their right to wield justice.

Using her duty and authority as Archbishop of the Anglican Church.

She bared her teeth and roared.

“Unlike a certain right hand I could mention, this spiritual item doesn’t just safely and comfortably negate your magic. It randomly transforms it and not even I can predict what form it will take. Peek inside the open box at your peril. There you will find the very sin and karma you directed at others!!”

Since it was completely random, there was only one reason why Fortune wasn’t caught in the explosion and killed too: pure luck. And that sort of incalculable factor was the most frightening thing in combat.

And.

Dark-skinned Necromancer Isabella Theism whispered under her breath while paying no heed to the harm that had come to her allies. She looked perfectly relaxed.

Her words formed an obvious curse.

“Thou art the dark king who rules all below the horizon. Thou art the ruler of the house that welcomes the sun god. Thou art the mighty manager of the night and thus the ruler of half the day – and therefore half the world. Thou art the god who may always be resurrected if the proper ritual is performed even if thy body is destroyed, torn to pieces, and scattered across the land. Thou art the great king of death, equality, justice, and of thy own sacrifice. I am prepared to welcome thee here.”

Cold sweat poured down Dion Fortune’s brow.

This…this one was truly bad.

This was one of the mythological symbols that even the Magician Crowley had valued highly. The Aeon of Isis, the Aeon of Osiris, and the Aeon of Horus… Even a middle or high school student who had perused the R&C Occultics homepage a bit would be familiar with those terms.

More than that, Dion Fortune herself had once met a woman calling herself Magic God Nephthys in London. It wasn’t that she had been no match for her. The difference had been so overwhelming she couldn’t even work up the will to try and fight. And this god was ranked higher even than Nephthys in the ancient myths.

Dion Fortune shouted, wide-eyed.

She named the nemesis who stood in her way.

“Underworld God Osiris!?”

Part 8

The two small girls, Lessar and Birdway, walked to the souvenir shops in the duty-free area near the lounge. Their eyes landed on a certain product shelf with great interest.

“Wow, they’ve got so many different kinds of condoms.”

“Well, Japan is known as the king of rubbers. I’ve heard their silicone technology is impressive. Seems like a frivolous use of technology to me. Could this be why their birthrate is so low?”

“…”

They travel all the way to Japan and this is what they choose to focus on? Kamijou couldn’t follow their reasoning.

Lessar trembled a little.

“But why would anyone need one in an airport? …Gasp!! D-do they all use them on the plane? Now there’s an exciting idea!!”

“Okay, this conversation ends now.”

Birdway toyed with a pair of binoculars, although it was unclear what use they would be in an airport.

But her attention shifted elsewhere.

“Hm, something is happening here.”

“See, I told you this would happen.”

“?”

Kamijou frowned.

Told her what would happen?

The plan was for Hamazura Shiage to be handed over, right? These two had taken a British government plane to Academy City, but they hadn’t joined the Anglicans. Was this related to why they were acting on their own?

“Hey… This isn’t funny. All the lost mail in Academy City ends up here. If a bunch of big macho magicians go nuts here in District 23, I won’t be able to search for my document!!”

“If that’s the worst of your worries, you can count yourself lucky.”

He didn’t like the sound of that.

Did that mean they were about to enter a phase where he had even bigger things to worry about!?

Birdway snatched a five-color permanent marker set from a shelf and addressed him.

“Listen, Kamijou Touma. Today is going to be a busy day. A lot of things you didn’t expect are going to happen. But no matter what might happen, remember this one thing.”

She provided a much too ominous prophecy.

“Our quarry is a magician. Capturing Hamazura Shiage is unfortunately not enough to settle this.”

Part 9

He ran away.

Refusing Dion Fortune’s proffered hand.

Now Hamazura Shiage really was on his own. While still a fugitive who could be killed as a villain at any time.

And while he couldn’t work with Fortune, she was, in a way, correct. So correct that her words had pierced him sharply.

…A drowning man will grasp at straws.

That perfectly described what was currently driving Hamazura. Maybe anyone would do the same when their life was on the line, but he needed to do something about the thought process leading him to act so haphazardly. If he really wanted to survive, it wasn’t the straws floating on the water’s surface he needed to grasp when doing so meant using up one of the few action tickets he had left. He needed to evacuate to a firmer and sturdier goal, like a boat, island, or continent.

But what exactly was there?

It would sadden his girlfriend if he died. Now that he had chosen to act, he had to make it worth it.

“Aneri, search for a path to an open lobby!”

His cracked phone buzzed twice. Apparently Aneri was concerned he would be seen by too many people. But the negative vibration did not change Hamazura’s mind.

There was no perfectly safe route here.

“Sure, no one’ll see me if I go hide in a narrow, deserted dead end, but that’s just offering myself on a platter to be killed. I need more innocent observers around so they can’t get at me!!”

He was working from the baseline of not wanting to die.

Since the Anglicans planned to kill him on sight, he couldn’t just approach them with his hands in the air. They would simply kill him as planned.

In that case…

“Getting arrested by Academy City law enforcement like Anti-Skill or Judgment would be best. For me.”

The cracked phone buzzed twice.

Aneri was apparently asking why.

“Like I said, I doubt those Brits will even hesitate to kill me if they find me and there’s no one else around,” said Hamazura. “But what if other people are watching? Academy City must have accepted some kind of explanation for handing me over to Britain. They expect the Brits to give me a fair trial. So can they choose to give me a summary execution here just cause it would be easier? By placing an Academy City resident between me and the Brits, they won’t be able to kill me even if they want to.”

And while the Brits were sitting around trying to figure out what to do, Hamazura could enter a cell and let himself be arrested. That would rob the UK of their justification of killing him because he was a dangerous fugitive.

Enemies from a major power could be frightening, but that also meant they had to obey the rules of their home country. And they didn’t have the right to kill an appropriately managed criminal on their own discretion.

(Sounds like Aneri doesn’t know much about politics and diplomacy. Well, that makes sense for an AI that only has to be correct. When all you have is data to understand a world full of imprecise things like conjecture and reading the room, making precise predictions can’t be easy.)

“So what’s the quickest way I can get Anti-Skill to arrest me? The immigration gate for international flights? No, that’s where Fortune was. I can’t go back there. Other than that, maybe the office that handles drug enforcement? Anyway, Ane-”

He started to give a command, but his mouth froze mid-word.

He noticed a smell that didn’t belong in a public facility. He caught a faint whiff of cigarette smoke.

Puzzled, he looked around…and his eyes were drawn to a decorative column.

“What is that card?”

Something was pasted there. The smooth laminated object was about the size of an ordinary credit card. But what was that drawn on it? It looked kind of like a letter composed of straight lines, but he could tell it wasn’t English at least.

The card wasn’t alone.

He saw a second and a third. …No, they were pasted all over the lobby. On the floor, on the walls, and even on the ceiling located higher up than in a gym!? He might not have given it much thought with just the one, but the sheer quantity made it creepy. What the hell were they?

And that wasn’t the only thing out of the ordinary.

This was the spacious lobby of an international airport, yet he hadn’t seen a single other person for a while now!?

The cracked phone suddenly played its loudest alarm.

“Aneri, what is this!?” he shouted, already getting down.

He had already developed a habit of obeying Aneri before asking what was happening, which proved fortunate for him in this case.

It would have been at his neck height otherwise.

Something orange raced by horizontally, burning the air and exploding. Flames erupted in a single direction like a fiery avalanche. Empty air was scorched. If Hamazura had remained standing, he wouldn’t just have lost his head – his charred mincemeat would have been scattered across the area.

He would swear no one had been there a second earlier.

Hamazura frantically rolled away along the floor. He had his hands full staying alive, so he didn’t care how this made him look.

“Eek!?”

Someone appeared as if from thin air.

Without any warning whatsoever, they appeared less than three meters away from him.

Right in the middle of the giant airport lobby with nothing at all to hide behind.

He heard a gloomy voice.

“Thermo? No, was it that phone’s signal? Did you spot me with a makeshift anti-personnel radar using microwaves? …Honestly, this is what makes Academy City so strange and disturbing.”

(That wasn’t meta materials!? Did he use heat or something to expand the air and bend the light!?)

Simply put, a mirage.

While Hamazura was familiar with the natural phenomenon, it was still uncanny seeing someone make such skilled use of it. Something felt so badly off his skin tingled.

Was that 2m guy…a priest? He had long hair dyed red, a barcode tattoo under one eye, and a cigarette in his mouth. None of those things seemed very priestly, but it was his eyes that most clashed with that identity. This clearly wasn’t the sort of person who kindly listened to people’s worries and provided advice. Those were the eyes of a predator.

“Well, at least the people clearing field is up. Now we don’t have to worry about any normal people getting mixed up in it. So let’s enjoy this, enemy of all creation who chose to stray from the righteous path.”

(This disturbing feeling… I can’t be sure, but I don’t think he’s even an esper!!)

“Kh!! Aneri, a little help!”

A booming sound dully and deeply stirred up the air.

The scene ahead of Hamazura was obscured from right to left by an enormous, thick steel wall extending like a police baton. A fire shutter. The ceiling here was even higher up than in a gym, but the airport had to protect its guests from the threat of fire and smoke. This thick wall worked much like a maintenance hangar’s giant shutter as it cut off the space between Hamazura and the big guy.

“Okay, I need to get out of here before that guy can find a way around! Aneri!!”

This was an international airport. They dealt with jet fuel here, so the fire shutter was blessedly thick.

Or so Hamazura thought.

Until he heard some kind of…unpleasant…and very sticky sound.

“…”

The fire shutter built to aviation accident standards turned orange and melted before his eyes. Like it had been thrown into a blast furnace.

A large hole formed.

And the tall priest didn’t hesitate to step through with red and blue flame swords in his hands.

“You have got to be kidding!” shouted Hamazura, wide-eyed.

A moment later…

Crash!!!

It came from the side.

A 10-ton tanker truck crashed through the airport wall and slammed into Stiyl Magnus.

Maybe it was out of habit, but the redhead priest swung a flame sword toward the incoming object on reflex…and only then recalled it was a tanker truck.

He stopped the motion, but it was too late.

And this was a special vehicle loaded with the special kind of jet fuel used at international airports.

It exploded.

Hamazura was watching from a good distance away, but even he was thrown horizontally when the wall of compressed air hit him. He knew he had to have slammed into the floor less than a second later, but his sense of pain was just gone.

He ignored the intense ringing in his ears and gathered all this strength to shout into his cracked phone from the floor.

“Aneeeri!!!?”

He felt two buzzes.

He looked to the cracked screen to see a photo of the tanker truck moments before it exploded. Aneri was probably trying to show him there wasn’t anyone in the driver’s seat, but that wasn’t his only concern.

That priest hadn’t died, had he?

Hamazura was struggling to his feet and worrying about the possibility of secondary and tertiary explosions when the sea of flames swelled out from within and exploded again.

“Come forth, Innocentius.”

His heart froze.

He heard something. He thought he heard a voice from beyond the orange flames.

He saw a dark figure. A big one. No human was that size! Maybe the lighting was creating an optical illusion, but he didn’t have time to confirm that!

“Forget worrying if a stranger survived!! I’m getting out of here!!”

Was that guy a magician? They were honestly too much for Hamazura. After living in Academy City’s back alleys, he knew scientific espers were bad enough, but those magicians were something else entirely. They inspired a nastier fear that couldn’t be explained by cracking open a physics or chemistry textbook. The fear of taboos, of curses, of divine punishment, of hexes.

But.

No, maybe “so” was the better word.

All of a sudden, she was there.

He didn’t even have time to blink.

Quite literally so. The next thing he knew, a woman with a long black ponytail was running alongside him. But this wasn’t a case of her ignoring the distance between them by teleporting in. The explosive blast of wind that blew in a moment later was undeniably the sonic boom created by her compressing and pushing the air out of her way.

In other words, she had broken the sound barrier.

Without using any kind of gear. If the textbooks he never read anyway couldn’t explain these people, could someone tell him what he could rely on to understand them!?

“This is bullsh-”

He didn’t even have time to complain to the world how unfair this was.

Her sword flashed.

The fact that she was wearing a nearly 2m katana at her hip in a supposedly safe airport was bad enough, but now she was attacking too fast for his eye to follow. He couldn’t even hope to dodge or defend. Before he even knew what was happening, the world seemed to spin around him and his back slammed into the floor.

How had she used a sword to flip him around?

He wished someone could at least explain that to him.

“Gah!!”

It knocked the breath from him. The flow of time returned to normal, but he wasn’t at all happy about it. He wasn’t used to feeling pain and agony from inside his body instead of at the skin level. In other words, he was terrified. The idea of an out-of-body experience was starting to sound awfully nice.

Gasping for breath, Hamazura used what little air was in his lungs to shout.

“Do it, Aneri!! I don’t care what, just do it now!”

Another empty tanker truck crashed in from the outside world.

It changed nothing.

The ponytail woman didn’t even swing her ridiculously long katana. She artlessly held her empty hand out to grab the 10-ton vehicle barreling toward her and stopped it. Easily.

With a thunderous “thoom!!”, the large truck’s bumper and engine grill dented deeply in. The wipers bent and the windshield shattered. Meanwhile, the katana woman didn’t seem to have a scratch on her.

…She was on another level entirely.

Even Aneri fell silent. The AI would smoothly answer any question the human asked, so he had never even considered the possibility of it not having an answer. How much of a monster was that woman!?

Hamazura couldn’t rely on Aneri anymore.

Those dangerous people had been unleashed. Dion Fortune claimed to be in control of the Brits, but where was she now? He seriously doubted she was safe.

What could Hamazura do on his own?

He couldn’t escape.

Part of that was his inability to make full use of AI Aneri’s abilities. …But in the end, the biggest problem of all was that he didn’t have clear idea of what he wanted to do now that he had left his cell.

What could he do for Coronzon by gritting his teeth and surviving?

He could never defeat anyone if he hadn’t settled on a goal.

(Dammit.)

What was he doing?

That fundamental and critical question rose in the back of his mind.

This entire incident wouldn’t have happened if he had stayed put. No one would have had to wield any kind of deadly power. This slapstick comedy of meaningless slaughter wouldn’t help anyone out there.

He wanted to live. To survive.

The more he wished for that, the more confusion and chaos he spread through the world. The more trouble he brought people, the more they hated him, and the more he was pushed to the outskirts of the world.

…Just like happened with Great Demon Coronzon.

(Dammit!!)

He didn’t know what this invisible “something” was. What kind of mine had he stepped on here? He could definitely feel the outlines of something unfair and unreasonable, but his underdeveloped vocabulary couldn’t produce the words he needed to tell him what it was!!

Hamazura didn’t even have the strength left to shut his eyes in the final moment.

That was when it happened.

He heard a dull, dull impact.

He was dumbfounded.

Hamazura was accustomed to violence as the recipient, but even he froze.

That was not a sound a human being made when punched. The heavy metallic tone was more like the peal of a giant bell.

And the ponytail katana woman who had presented such an insurmountable threat suddenly flew straight to the side. That monster had stopped a 10-ton tanker truck with a single hand…but some other monster had knocked her back well over 15m with a single punch?

“Hwa ha ha☆”

It was a girl.

The excessively thin blonde girl wore an apron and a thick blast-resistant coat covered with sheet copper. Did her sweet aroma come from the terrarium of various flowers contained on the inside of her coat? The metallic tone had apparently been the result of punching someone with the coat’s overlarge sleeves. They appeared to move independently even without her arms in them.

Hamazura didn’t know her name.

But another boy who Hamazura loathed would have recognized her immediately.

She was one of the Transcendents.

Specifically, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet.

Hamazura had shown up late to the battle against Great Demon Coronzon, so he didn’t know everything that went on there. Still, hadn’t that girl been working with Kamijou Touma? Wouldn’t that make her one of those who hunted Coronzon down, calling her a Great Demon!?

“What the hell!? Whose side are you on!?”

“Huhh? Did you think I was on someone else’s side? Ah ha ha! I very clearly just saved you, but you still can’t believe it? You must be really hated to have trust issues like that!”

Even Hamazura could tell she was talking down to him.

And that she had the power to back up that attitude.

After all, the focus here had completely shifted away from the katana woman. The entire world had accepted that she was the star of this scene.

Apparently she could joke around in such a hopeless situation because she even blew him a kiss.

“To be honest, Coronzon was fairly tempting too, but she was actually rejecting the love she was given. If not for that, I could have protected her along with the rest of the world’s hated people. I did let the amateurs handle things that night, but that doesn’t mean I grant that resolution a perfect score or anything.”

“Wha-?”

“If you want to know why I was fighting by Kamijou Touma’s side yesterday, well, that’s why. I just wanted to stop that ridiculous mess from harming the many unknown hated people on the other side of the world who wouldn’t even have been counted among the statistics. So all I wanted was to prevent the end of the world. I didn’t actually hate Coronzon so much I wanted her dead. But now Coronzon no longer exists as the greatest threat to the world. I say that wipes the slate clean on your threat level too. And if the world is still going to unfairly hate a harmless leftover like you…well, then this is a job for me. I hope you’re ready, world, cause I’ve got a light, happy, and comical lesson to teach you. Don’t think you can stay so cold and heartless forever☆”

Hamazura was speechless.

This was ridiculous.

It was goddamn ridiculous, but Hamazura still felt himself trembling.

There was still someone left in the world who would talk fairly about Coronzon instead of just calling her a Great Demon!

“I have just one salvation condition: someone thoroughly hated by the world as a whole.”

She held a finger to her lips.

The emaciated girl whispered alluringly. With a melting look on her face that felt at odds with her appearance.

That monster explained her primary purpose in life.

“A boy who sided with a great demon, lost, and still can’t bring himself to spit on the person he bet on? A human being who decided to stick to his guns even if it makes the rest of the world loathe him? …Now there’s a way of life I can get behind. So I now recognize you as passing my Transcendent salvation condition. The isolation your choices have brought you may be self-inflicted, but I, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet, will show you that it was neither meaningless nor worthless☆”

Part 10

The airport lobby had been thoroughly destroyed.

More than a hundred footsteps thundered together. Anglicans, Amakusas, former Roman Catholics – various groups adjusted their formations with spiritual items in hand. They rearranged their positions to place Blodeuwedd the Bouquet at the center.

Unsteadily, but definitely under her own power, Kanzaki Kaori stood back up.

She was one of the fewer than twenty Saints in the world.

“Kh, I am willing…to overlook that.”

“Ohh? You’re fine after taking a Transcendent attack to the head? You’ve got one solid cranium, don’t you? Or is it your brains? Do you just have more muscle packed inside your head?”

“Hand Hamazura Shiage over to us. Do so and you need not be harmed.”

“Hey, now! I just provoked you. Don’t act like this is a polite conversation.”

“You fought alongside us to protect the world from Great Demon Coronzon. We may not know who you Transcendents are, but I would still feel bad cutting you down the very next day.”

“Oh? …You think you’re better than me?”

Hamazura gulped and looked up at Blodeuwedd the Bouquet from where he sat on the floor.

Yes, she was ultimately one of those who had gathered to hunt down Coronzon.

The monster herself sighed at his look of fear. With the face of a wounded girl. As if to say his gaze hurt her more than the armed group surrounding her.

Kanzaki continued speaking.

“As a Saint and a Transcendent, we are both extraordinary magicians. We have too little data to predict what will happen if we clash head on. What if Hamazura Shiage, who you are attempting to illegitimately protect, is harmed by the side effects of our battle?”

It was a touching attempt at persuasion.

But grinning Blodeuwedd the Bouquet didn’t miss that Kanzaki Kaori had her hand on the hilt of the sword at her hip. And careful observation also showed that her fingertips were precisely manipulating thin wires rather than the sword.

“You act all benevolent, but you’re just distracting me so you can launch a supersonic surprise attack.”

“Your accusations mean nothing.”

(Hmm. Is this why that Hamazura guy bloodlessly flipped around and fell to the floor when she attacked with her sword? She must be able to capture you with the wires and throw you. I bet she used a similar trick to stop that tanker truck with a single hand.)

Apparently Kanzaki Kaori was willing to handle the dirty work if it meant she could keep the enemy from dying. Very noble, but Blodeuwedd the Bouquet had no patience for a leader so beloved by her followers.

“Making people hate you like that isn’t bad, but weren’t you paying attention? I’m siding with Hamazura Shiage right now.”

So.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet took a step forward.

Casually.

Fwoosh!!!

Blackness roared out.

That blackness was in fact thousands, or tens of thousands, of crows shattering the tempered glass to break in through the large windows. In a bird strike, the crow sucked into the passenger plane’s engine could even cause the plane to crash, making them hated at international airports – even though the crows didn’t do it intentionally.

The encirclement specialized for anti-magician combat collapsed.

The Anglicans had had an overwhelming advantage in numbers, but in this moment they became the minority.

A rapid shift came over the state of the battle.

“Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet was a Transcendent. Her mere presence changed everything.

The Anglicans were blotted out.

Of course, the Anglicans weren’t just going to take it.

“Tch!”

“No hard feelings if I take out more than necessary! My time scavenging for food in the back alleys didn’t leave me with many good memories regarding crows and rats.”

Flames shot from Tatemiya Saiji’s large flamberge sword and Agnese swung down her Lotus Wand to bring down a distant group of crows like they were hit by a hammer.

These were only crows, after all. Their numbers were overwhelming, but each individual one was weak. Deadly magic could easily eliminate the threat. However…

“Are you sure that kind of shortsighted thinking can get you through this? You’re free to kill, but don’t forget that all life is considered equal.”

She cackled.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet looked down at the Anglicans with an obvious sneer on her lips.

“Each life you take will be added to your list of sins, so do be careful. The count is accurate. You can’t cheat it. The most dangerous of the deadly risks out there are the ones where the threat isn’t apparent at first glance. And once you’re trapped, it’s too late to work up a countermeasure☆”

When you curse someone, dig two graves.

That phrase might sound like a fair system on par with the law of action and reaction, but there was actually a loophole. …When the number of lives on one side was far greater, the system ceased to be fair.

Badump!!

There was an odd sound like a heartbeat. No, maybe it really was a heartbeat.

The magicians’ and nuns’ faces changed color.

From red to blue and then to purple.

Hamazura didn’t have the specialist knowledge to know what was happening deep inside them.

But he could see their eyes opening wide.

He didn’t know what was happening, but even an idiot like him could tell those people were suffering. He couldn’t celebrate that his helper was so overpowered with this going on!

A person’s face wouldn’t turn that color even if you strangled them with a thick rope.

It was of course Blodeuwedd the Bouquet who Hamazura shouted at.

“Hey!! All you have to do is keep me safe. I didn’t ask you to kill them!”

The Transcendent tilted her head.

She was confused. She really did seem to find this puzzling.

“Umm, but they’re seriously trying to kill you.”

“So what?”

“They made no attempt to find out what kind of person you are and just decided to kill you because you had an evil friend.”

“Again, so what!? I don’t want to see people die. Is that so wrong? They may be dumb as hell, but that doesn’t mean we have to think on their level! So just stop this!! You said you were taking my side, didn’t you!?”

He heard a quiet sound.

No, it was laughter.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet…was it? The emaciated girl doubled over and her shoulders shook with laughter.

“Ohh…good, good. Siding with you was so the right decision. I may have stumbled onto a real prize this time.”

When she raised her head again, the short girl’s flushed face displayed a hint of inappropriate sensuality.

“I love that sort of hated person☆”

The density of the black color increased.

Apparently his attempt had severely backfired.

But a thick pressure pushed back against the black storm of crows.

Was it that katana woman?

“Nwa ha ha! Go, Hamazura!! Let the magician handle that magician. I’ll see it through! Besides, I don’t like the way those supposedly righteous Anglicans are dragging an amateur into the ring, ganging up on him before he can even figure out the rules, and declaring victory for themselves!!”

“Are you saying those Anglicans or whatever can still turn this around? But they see me as a villain. And there’s no reason you have to go that far to help me!”

He couldn’t let Blodeuwedd the Bouquet handle it all. He was officially known as a filthy fugitive. He appreciated that she didn’t look down on Coronzon as a great demon and her support had tears welling up in his eyes, but if she lent him a hand, it could end up with her being on the run too.

“Hey, if you stay here, you’ll just get hit by a stray shot and killed. Probably anyway.”

He decided to run away.

Part 11

Itsuwa of the Amakusa Church paled as she leaned on her spear.

She gulped.

But not because of Blodeuwedd the Bouquet’s spell that made one pay for a life with a life.

She had caught sight of something inexplicable out the corner of her eye.

How long had she been there?

How had she gotten this close without any of the professional Anglican magicians noticing?

The next thing Itsuwa knew, she was standing there.

She was an exceptionally tall woman. She had long, long blonde hair and she wore a loose white dress and a large wide-brimmed hat.

She was the Transcendent known as Good, Old Mary.

“Hm. I thought for sure mama’s role would be to side with that lonely boy, but it would appear the situation has changed.”

What was she doing here? No one had an answer.

How had she suddenly appeared here? Again, no answer.

“He has continued his escape with assistance from an unusually capable AI that even makes deductions in the field of magic despite the limited learning material, and now he has drawn the interest of a Transcendent to provide him with a special magical fighter. The boy is rapidly leaving mama’s salvation condition. Which means…while it will be the complete opposite of my original plan, mama may take this side instead.”

She spoke.

Calmly.

She said it didn’t matter at all to her if she went with the complete opposite of her original plan.

Transcendents dressed up as gods to draw on those gods’ power.

Their theater and divine summoning spells were no more than a method. That wasn’t the core of who they were.

So perhaps this was the most frightening thing about them.

…There was no reason it had to be Hamazura Shiage.

As long as they met their salvation condition, a Transcendent would assist anyone unconditionally.

That was true of Good, Old Mary and it was true of Blodeuwedd the Bouquet who was currently assisting Hamazura. Anyone who wanted the assistance of a Transcendent’s immense power had to accept one powerful limitation: they could not leave that individual Transcendent’s salvation condition. Otherwise, their immensely powerful ally would attack and kill them.

“A group of inconsequential individuals who have boosted their strength by applying several different special conditions, which has in turn eliminated their own standing. A collection of individuals who could not acquire those unfair special conditions and thus had their own beliefs and justice denied.”

And so, she – Good, Old Mary of the Transcendents – whispered.

“Perfect. Mama recognizes you Anglicans as passing my Transcendent salvation condition. …Do not assume miracles are granted only to a chosen few, world.”

Part 12

It sounded like bursting carbonation.

Except this was more brutal.

The thousands or tens of thousands of crows that looked like a pitch black wall went limp and fell to the airport floor. Blodeuwedd the Bouquet frowned and, for the first time, focused on a single individual within the enemy group.

“That was gas.”

Good, Old Mary.

The beautiful lips below the wide-brimmed hat parted to speak. One of her hands toyed with a multi-tool knife.

“Elementary, isn’t it? If killing them adds to your sins and seals your movements, I only need to stop them non-lethally. Mama mixes potions in the kitchen. I am the Transcendent who uses equipment based in ordinary reality to mix up potions that can produce any phenomenon, including the mysteries of life. If I lack something, I need only create it. A simple solution.”

“Ohh? So you’re taking that side?”

“Is that wrong?”

“No, not really. I just don’t get risking your life to protect some giant faceless power structure. Seems like an ultra-boring salvation condition to me.”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet was answered by a tremor shaking the entire international airport.

Some kind of fine dust fell from the ceiling.

No, it went beyond that.

Were insults to her salvation targets that big a deal to Good, Old Mary?

“Risk 4: Releasing the single seal – leaving human territory.”

The change couldn’t have been more obvious.

At more than 200m tall, the colossal thing would have towered over a domed stadium, but here it was visible outside thanks to the international airport’s outer wall and a portion of its ceiling collapsing.

The three-legged still was a piece of lab equipment that used to seal the secret arts of life.

The emaciated girl put a hand on her hip and looked up at it.

“The Tribikos, huh?”

But her reaction was not what Good, Old Mary had expected.

Even now, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet was smiling.

Grinning even.

“A big lab that lets you mix anything on the front line is a threat to be sure…but do you actually know how to use it? I feel like you’ve just started slamming it into stuff to show off how destructive a heavy object can be.”

Good, Old Mary ignored that and gave a command to the Tribikos.

It lifted one of its three legs. Tearing through the airport building as it did so.

The world itself shook.

But…

“?”

“Don’t tell me this is enough to surprise you.”

It had stopped.

The end of the Tribikos’s leg had stopped less than 100cm above Blodeuwedd the Bouquet’s head. A straining sound reached Good, Old Mary’s ears, as if something unseen were blocking its way.

This wasn’t right.

From a purely physical perspective, the Tribikos was as large as a domed stadium. How many tens of thousands of tons was that? And that weight was all being concentrated on a single point like with a high heel. How could one of its three legs be stopped this way? Who in the world could pull off something like that!?

“I am the Transcendent who loves all the hated.”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet was sneering.

This smile held a very different meaning from the one she directed Hamazura’s way.

“The word all is key. …We already saw Telesma kneaded and molded to artificially summon Underworld God Osiris. You didn’t think my salvation was only for pests that can be physically explained in this world, did you?”

A dull bubbling sound followed.

From the floor at the emaciated girl’s feet. The airport’s clean floor grew discolored and peeled back. Almost like a rotten stew giving off a noxious gas as it boiled.

What emerged was not of this world.

These were clearly otherworldly beings who had crossed over from another phase.

“Sathariel, Penemue, Satanael, Armaros, Kokabiel, Tamiel, Baraqiel, Azazel, and Demon Lord Shemhaza!! Grigori fallen angels who were judged an absolute evil for no more than falling in love with humans, marrying them, revealing this secret to your families, and bearing children with them! Though you are derided as the reason heaven inflicted Noah’s flood upon the earth, I grant you love for your decision to seek a modicum of happiness even if no one else would understand. Lend me your bygone strength!!!”

The red and black feathers scattering through the air were far more sinister than the crows’. Something of indeterminate number and form covered up the Tribikos all at once. The colossal object resembled a domed stadium with three legs, but it was swallowed whole.

Spells that made use of Telesma weren’t unusual, but using so many varied powers at once and releasing it without first sealing it in an object was highly abnormal even for the magic side.

Were she alone, Good, Old Mary may have been able to fall back to a safe distance and resume the fight there. The Tribikos was not her only lab equipment. She could have sacrificed that one to buy her enough time to summon another.

But she had chosen to save the Anglicans.

For a Transcendent, that carried more weight than her own life.

“Kh!! I see! You used Sathariel to seal mama’s Tribikos and hold it in place, didn’t you? Blodeu-!!”

“Hah hahh hahh!! Good, Old Mary, you really are no more than a boring healer. Sure, you have some weird exceptions like swinging around a heavy mace and some insta-death attacks, but you’re biggest selling point is your limited resurrection, right? Looks like you don’t have what it takes to defeat a true fighter and summoner like me who excels at providing a single powerful damage source!!!”

Part 13

Kamijou and the girls felt the entire international airport shake vertically.

They were at a large counter where the path branched off to the different lobbies. Kamijou sensed something like ominous ripples in the air.

Leivinia Birdway clicked her tongue.

“Those idiots prefer to flex their muscles than use their heads. And now they’ve exceeded the limits of their own people clearing field. Magic is meant to be done quietly and in secret. People will question England’s reputation as a country of proper ladies and gentlemen at this rate. Have those diplomatic amateurs forgotten there’s a government plane at this airport?”

“It may not be the Anglicans doing this though.”

Who else could it be?

Whoever it was, Kamijou couldn’t ignore a commotion like this.

He fought the current of the fleeing crowd to run toward the center of the blast. He passed by a girl in a fluffy coat on the way.

“You have to be kidding me! If they bring the entire airport down, what happens to my important missing document!? I’ll be held back if I don’t get that proof of life to school!”

“Ehh? Does that even matter at this point? Seems trivial by comparison.”

“A year of school isn’t trivial for a high schooler, Lessar. I’ll stick out like a sore thumb. My life is in as much of a crisis as the world is! I’m at the brink!!”

Now, Kamijou didn’t want to be part of this crisis if he didn’t have to be.

But when he knew serious harm was imminent, he couldn’t just ignore it.

Academy City had only just begun to recover.

If something serious happened now, right as he was getting back on his feet, how long a detour would he need to take before he could reclaim his ordinary life!?

Lessar sounded disinterested.

“Sounds like the Anglicans are engaged in some kind of crazy battle. I’m intercepting as much of their communications as I can and it seems like that Hamazura guy made a real mess of things.”

“Wait, what did he do?”

“Hamazura Shiage isn’t who matters,” said Birdway. “There’s a separate problem here. And with everyone’s focus on Hamazura, no one is watching the real threat. That leaves the real target free to do whatever they want. We need to fix that before it’s too late.”

Part 14

The vertical tremor was noticeable even here.

How many times was that now?

He had run away.

He had put a lot of distance between himself and the fighting.

Hamazura Shiage was currently in…what was this room even called? It was part of the airport’s “backstage” zone. All around him and even overhead, narrow conveyor belts branched out in all directions. He assumed this was where the suitcase tags were mechanically read and the suitcases were routed. Which meant whenever your luggage ended up traveling to some other country without you, this was where it went wrong. In that sense, he couldn’t help but dislike all this cold, precision machinery.

Another tremor.

“…”

Hamazura knew it was meaningless, but he couldn’t help but look back the way he had come. Over and over again.

…Was Blodeuwedd the Bouquet alright?

There were people with special power. There were monsters with power beyond anything Hamazura could imagine. But he also knew that strength was not absolute. Even Coronzon had been an individual who could lose her life if she took it too far.

He relied on others because he was afraid.

And that fear led other people to lose their lives instead of him.

That way of thinking probably felt insolent to those with ridiculous strength, but still.

“Yo☆”

Someone popped out next to him.

It was Blodeuwedd the Bouquet. She looked to his face and grinned.

“What are you still doing here, Hamazura? I thought you’d have escaped the airport by now. Wait, don’t tell me. Did you wait cause you were worried about me? Ha ha ha. How cute!!”

He didn’t have it in him to deal with her teasing.

Hamazura shouted, wide-eyed.

“Wait, but, um, what happened with that katana woman!? And all the others too!?”

Even now, the low tremors shaking the entire airport continued intermittently in the distance. With the intensity of an artillery battle. But if Blodeuwedd the Bouquet was hanging around here, then who were the Anglicans fighting?

He soon had his answer.

“You mean that Saint and Good, Old Mary? Well, I expect they’re fighting a whole bunch of hair thinking they’re fighting me. The Hanged Man happened to be among the hated beings who emerged. He’s said to be the villain who gave vanity and makeup to human women. Perfect for a deception spell☆”

“Aneri, explain.”

He only got a double buzz of refusal.

The AI must not have understand what she was talking about either.

(Hair monsters, huh?)

Hamazura started to recall someone else.

Apparently those things were still fighting. Which meant…

“So not even a monster like you could actually defeat the enemy. …So there’s that katana woman and…Good, Old Mary? Is she really that dangerous a final boss?”

“Her attacks aren’t all that impressive. She’s primarily a healer, so she’s a real pain in the ass if you have to keep fighting her and she keeps buying time. The best plan with her is to find a way to stop fighting and get out of there.”

…So the tremors shaking the entire airport didn’t qualify as “impressive”? They apparently lived in a very different world from Hamazura.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet cutely tilted her head.

“There’s no real reason you have to say here in the airport, is there? The Anglicans are backed by the country of England. Give them time and they will overwhelm you with numbers. That means sealing off all the exits and searching through the entire locked room they created. If you don’t want me to kick your ass for worrying so much about the enemy’s lives, I recommend escaping before those idiots can set up a perimeter.”

His cracked phone buzzed twice. To reject that idea? No, AI Aneri may have been upset at being beaten to making that recommendation. Could data even feel upset?

Hamazura didn’t want to be caught by those Anglican people either.

But what was he supposed to do?

“I’d love to escape, but where am I supposed to go in this giant airport?”

“Hmm? If you don’t have any ideas of your own, I could always break through one of these walls for you. With a nice, solid punch.”

“Help me, Aneri! Peacefully!!”

He was reliant on someone else either way. …Assuming Aneri counted as a “someone” that is.

Aneri displayed a map of the airport taken (illicitly) from somewhere and added recommendation arrows to it. Instead of just showing the shortest route, it provided the route least likely to be watched or guarded. However, they came across a door with an electronic lock along the way.

He held his phone up to the reader on the wall and the sturdy door opened as if this were a cheap magic trick. This actually worried Hamazura more. Wasn’t an airport supposed to have especially strict physical security to prevent terrorist attacks? This seemed awfully lax.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet gave the cracked screen an impressed look.

“Huh. I feel silly only asking now, but does that phone do security cameras too?”

“I don’t know how it works, so ask Aneri.”

He felt like Academy City was overflowing with things where he had no idea how they worked. …This was hardly a new state of affairs and, for better or for worse, there may have been things no one could explain the inner workings of.

They opened a few more electronic locks, passed through a back area lined with plastic boxes…and finally arrived at a small back entrance for staff. The door had another smart card reader. It didn’t even take three seconds.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet gave him a puzzled look.

“What’s the matter? Get on out of here, Hamazura.”

“But…”

It hadn’t been very…smooth.

There had been a slight pause or “hiccup” when opening this door’s lock compared to the others. It hadn’t even lasted a full blink of the eye, but that was why it stood out so vividly, like a lagging video.

Aneri was using a loophole – a vulnerability – the airport staff had completely forgotten existed.

That meant the airport would never use the loophole.

Yet some other data had been flowing through it, conflicting with Aneri’s command?

“…”

Hamazura considered it for a moment.

“Aneri. Where’s the closest access point to here? A big international airport like this must have dozens of them.”

The exit was right there, but this amateur suddenly decided on a change of plans. However, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet didn’t protest. She was likely confident in her ability to slaughter any pursuers if it came to it.

They turned back and electronically forced open another door.

The chilly room beyond was lined with computers the size of vending machines. He didn’t even need to hook up the phone with a cable. Once through the door that jammed EM signals, a wireless connection was enough to exchange data.

The flood of internal data didn’t tell Hamazura much.

So he had AI Aneri flag any information requiring a closer look.

“What the hell?”

Hamazura frowned as he viewed the cracked smartphone screen.

Black_Oneday.

He had no idea what that English text meant. That one unnatural phrase was scrawled within the otherwise orderly script.

Could it be?

“Is someone other than us hacking in here too?”

Chapter 2: Equations and Magic Circles – Black_Oneday.

Part 1

The glass and ceiling had broken and collapsed in the international airport’s lobby. The large clock on the wall was broken too badly to function, the hands stopped at 5:15 PM.

“Oh, honestly!!” exclaimed Good, Old Mary in uncharacteristic frustration.

Perhaps this was proof that, while she had since acquired the functions of a god, she had been born an ordinary human.

“Vanity and makeup? I’m more mad at myself than her. Mama shouldn’t be falling for silly tricks like this!”

Good, Old Mary held a torn-off upper body in one hand.

She tossed aside something that had been called Fallen Angel Azazel.

“Hey!! You’d better clarify your stance here soon. Are you trying to protect Academy City or destroy it!? Our recovery has only just begun here and we need resources more than anything. Don’t you get that this will all be a waste of time if you destroy the airport and we can’t get flights in!?”

“Take your complaints to them!! Damn Transcendents. They’re far too extreme to make good use of!”

One of Good, Old Mary’s salvation targets – was her name Kanzaki? – was complaining into a small radio, but Good, Old Mary didn’t pay her much heed. Once she decided to save someone, she would do so no matter what, but she didn’t take requests when it came to her methods…and all the Transcendents took that same stance.

However.

If Blodeuwedd the Bouquet thought this little trick had been enough to declare victory, then this was in fact an opportunity.

The three legged Tribikos was not Good, Old Mary’s only spiritual item.

Including the Bain-marie and the Kerotakis, her options ranged from familiar kitchen tools to grand lab equipment that could produce the miracles of life.

In other words…

(I already have a countermeasure for that illusion and camouflage using Azazel.)

Her lab equipment, which rivaled a broadcasting tower in size, had already finished mixing the potion she wanted.

This was one advantage of bringing such a colossal spiritual item to the front line. Whenever an unexpected problem occurred, it helped a lot if she could create a solution the very next moment.

(If Blodeuwedd the Bouquet attempts the same thing next time…I can eliminate it instantly. I don’t even need to pretend to be fooled. I can go for the kill right away.)

That meant it was time to search out where Blodeuwedd the Bouquet had disappeared to during the confusion. As long as Good, Old Mary had a goal in mind, she could mix together a potion to accomplish it. That was always her policy.

And.

A slight tremor ran down Good, Old Mary’s back.

She shuddered.

Her large hat shook as she looked up past the collapsed ceiling and into the blue sky.

“?”

Part 2

The reflector was located on the lunar surface.

That meant anywhere with a view of the moon was within that weapon’s range.

Part 3

The Black_Oneday hacking tool.

What exactly could someone accomplish with that?

Hamazura Shiage and Blodeuwedd the Bouquet had left the international airport through a small back entrance and were now hiding in an area full of the electric carts and forklifts used to transport suitcases. …Although Hamazura wasn’t very confident this really counted as hiding when it came to District 23 security.

His eyes dropped to the cracked screen of his phone.

“Apparently Black_Oneday is a specialized hacking tool that uses a vulnerability in Stardust.”

“What? I don’t know what that Black thing or that Star thing are.”

“I don’t either, so all I can do is read off what Aneri tells me. Aircraft and spacecraft are a lot more computerized nowadays, but hooking them up to the ordinary internet creates to much of a risk of remote cyber attacks. Like opening a door midflight and causing it to break apart. So the systems are kept separate from the ordinary lines. Everything from the programming language used to the encryption method and even the radio frequencies are different.”

“And all of that together is called Stardust? And it was all broken somehow? Are they stupid?”

“Maybe, but that also means Black_Oneday can’t cause any harm to anything other than the aerospace industry. So it’s not all bad, I guess?”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet didn’t seem delighted.

The monster frowned instead.

“Would that tool just be lying around in Academy City? Like a free game?”

“It was created by some respected university professor. He was sick of the airlines insisting their security was unhackable, so he wanted to give them enough of a scare they would actually start doing their job. So the tool is known as an independently created research sample. It’s not supposed to be publicly available, but someone could always create something that works the same way. So maybe this is a different version of it.”

Things made for benevolent purposes could end up harming people.

Not to mention the respected professor may not have been entirely honest about his reasons for making it.

Did he even know the real reason himself?

Could he just have wanted to give people a scare?

“So it was a fake cyber attack meant to make people more security conscious? Sounds like it had the opposite effect in reality…”

The emaciated girl tilted her head.

Maybe Blodeuwedd the Bouquet didn’t particularly care.

“So let’s just assume that Black_Oneday thing has fallen into the wrong hands. What could someone do with it? I don’t know much about hacking tools, but what’s the last thing we would want happening right now?”

“Hold on… Aneri, what’s this? You’re kidding, right?”

Hamazura had trouble believing the information Aneri had displayed on the phone’s cracked screen.

What was this city building?

“Moonbow. A strategic ground-launched optical weapon?”

Basically, it was a large-scale laser weapon. Powerful enough to pierce straight into a nuclear shelter located deep underground.

Moonbow would first fire a weaponized laser from an oscillator base in District 23 to outside the atmosphere, where it was reflected by a movable reflector covering the interior of a giant crater on the moon in order to target a specific point on Earth. The distance to the moon was more than 380 thousand kilometers, but the round trip only took an instant at light speed. That meant the powerful laser weapon could ignore the horizon and attack anywhere with a view of the moon. Any VIP around the world could be killed no matter how deep they hid underground.

To make matters worse, Aneri’s report said there were signs it had already been fired.

“It was targeting District 23… So a laser weapon with a range covering half the Earth was used to attack right next door?”

“Dammit, Good, Old Mary. Did you get vaporized by a pillar of light?”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet didn’t sound particularly concerned. As long as someone didn’t meet her salvation conditions, maybe she didn’t care too much what happened to them.

If a weapon like that could be fired repeatedly, the Earth was done for.

Both because of its destructive power and because it could turn the entire world against Academy City even if they hadn’t been the one to fire it.

…And even in this dire situation, Hamazura still couldn’t fight alongside the Anglicans. Because they wouldn’t allow it.

The Anglicans were hunting for him.

They were so focused on him they hadn’t noticed the Black_Oneday hacking tool or its user. Of course, he got the impression they wouldn’t be willing to hear him out even if he did give them this information.

Especially when Aneri could hack too. When they followed the path he had used to escape the airport, they would discover he had hacked open the electronic locks. The Anglicans didn’t know about Black_Oneday, so they would suspect Hamazura for any other hacking.

The Anglicans were a threat, but focusing on them alone would leave the Black_Oneday user free to act. Their object was unclear, but this could even lead to a war between Academy City and another country.

Should he say that served them right?

He couldn’t articulate why he felt this way, but that didn’t seem like it would help Coronzon.

The emaciated girl tilted her head.

“So is humanity doomed because the arbiters of justice are useless?”

“No… The weapon uses a large COIL, so the highly toxic gas needs to be neutralized each time it’s fired. Simply put, it takes a long time to reload.”

“Ehh? The hacker’s controlling it remotely, so why would they care?”

“It’s structurally designed so it can’t fire again until the toxic gas has been fully neutralized. You can’t get around that just by messing with the software remotely.”

“We wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with if they had made the thing fully manually controlled.”

Anyone could look like a genius if they waited to complain until after the problem had occurred.

But while it took a while, the reload time was only about 50 minutes.

If they didn’t track down the Black_Oneday user and deal with this before then, some other part of the world could be fried by a second powerful laser. And if that location was outside Academy City, it would mean war with the victim country.

In the worst case, the target would be related to the UK or the Vatican. Like an enclave or an airplane in flight. It was last night all over again.

“Can’t you get Aneri-tan to stop it?”

“I don’t get it myself, but apparently hacking doesn’t work that way.”

According to Aneri’s wall of text (weren’t AIs supposed to summarize things!?), two people could hack into the same computer separately. But it was difficult for one of them to take control and kick the other one out. They were both using the same vulnerability, so would plugging the hole lock them both out?

Not even the greatest sprinter could plan to keep their rival from reaching the goal.

So if the Black_Oneday user seriously wanted to cause mass destruction, Aneri couldn’t stop them.

This problem could only be solved by beating up the user in real life, not online.

“Hmm?” Blodeuwedd the Bouquet paused to think for a moment. “If we can’t stop their hacking before the time limit, couldn’t we physically destroy the laser facility before it can fire again as a backup plan?”

“I get the feeling you really could do that. But don’t.”

If someone did that without the appropriate authority and without going through the appropriate procedure, they were no more than a terrorist.

And if they spent all their time on that, they wouldn’t actually solve the real problem.

After all, the laser wasn’t the only weaponizable technology in District 23.

Aneri displayed a list ranked by danger level on the small screen.

“The most obvious one would be…the Morning Star? This above ground mass driver is pretty terrifying. It’s basically a giant railgun, right? I could see them launching a meteor all the way around the Earth and then dropping it on our heads.”

“What about this? A next-gen engine for optical rocket R&D? They’re talking around it, but isn’t that a donut-shaped fusion reactor using deuterium? That’s where they magnetically enclose plasma with a temperature over a hundred million degrees. Destroy the container while it’s running and it wouldn’t just destroy Academy City – the entire Kantou region would be wiped off the map and covered by the sea.”

“Meaning?”

“We have 50 minutes left, right? We need to make the most of that time. Destroying each individual facility isn’t going to work. Sounds like this crisis won’t end unless we defeat Black_Oneday itself.”

…His head hurt.

What was Academy City doing? He wasn’t sure how he wanted to spend the remaining days or even hours of his life, but here he was faced with a global crisis.

Hamazura couldn’t just sit idly by and let it happen.

He couldn’t just blindly run from the Brits anymore.

Coronzon’s methods may have been wrong, but she had been trying to create a better world in her own way. And his girlfriend Takitsubo and his old friends like Hanzou were still here in Academy City. He didn’t know who had set up this Black_Oneday game, but he was sick of seeing the world threatened with destruction for something as nonsensical as destruction for the sake of destruction.

Coronzon, huh?

“Why?”

Hamazura gritted his teeth.

Digging into this wouldn’t improve his odds of survival here. He knew that.

But he still hung his head, faced his inner thoughts, and forced out a resentful voice.

“Why did Coronzon have to die? And all for some formless concept like ‘the world’ or ‘the human race’?”

In that moment, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet had to have heard Hamazura’s groan.

Which was why she responded.

“Because she lost.”

Hamazura seriously thought his heart was going to stop.

What did she just say?

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet tilted her head cutely.

“Huh? Did I say something weird? Has anything ever been solved by someone proving themselves right and everyone just obeying them, or someone being proven wrong and backing down?”

“…”

“The world isn’t that simple, you dummy. The winner wins it all and the loser loses everything. Their dreams, righteousness, their lives, the world – everything. That’s always how the world has worked. Looking back in history, that’s been the way of things at least as far back as several thousand years BCE. …Kamijou Touma did kill Coronzon, but Coronzon had accepted these conditions when she fought. Are you going to start throwing a tantrum that those rules are unfair after the fact?”

“……………………………………………………………………………………”

What?

What, what, what, what, what was she talking about???

“Kamijou Touma failed to save Coronzon? You’re looking at this wrong. Kamijou Touma has had the right to kill all of the enemies he has defeated. As the one forced to bear the possibility of death were he to lose even once. Self-defense isn’t an obligation – it’s a right. It’s just that he never chose to exercise that right after he won. That’s all it was. Saving even one of the people he defeated is worthy of praise. Now, truth be told, I did somewhat expect him to save Coronzon since he was enough of a soft-hearted fool to save Alice. But if you respond with anger and throw a fit because he betrayed your expectations and didn’t go above and beyond just that one time, then you’re relying far too much on your enemy. Attacking all you like and then demanding forgiveness once you lose is making a mockery of the entire concept of combat.”

This should have been a perfectly logical argument, but it refused to enter his mind.

All the unfairness and unreasonableness he had only been vaguely aware of was rushing in at him all at once. It covered the entire world so thinly and widely it didn’t even feel real to Hamazura even though he had to be contained by it as well.

“Besides, what’s considered ‘right’ changes wildly depending on the time period, region, organization, and personal beliefs.”

Did she realize how messed up that idea was, or didn’t she?

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet sighed softly.

“Take Aleister Crowley for example. Some say he was promoted to 5=6 of the Inner Order by Mathers in Paris and others say the London faction didn’t recognize that and he was stuck in the Outer Order or as a Portal at 4=7. And Crowley himself claimed to be a 9=2 after creating new rules within his own cabal. You see what I’m getting at, don’t you? What’s ‘right’ changes depending on what source you use. There are as many answers as there are people and no one can agree on what the best answer is, so these things can only be resolved by force.”

No, he didn’t see.

That wasn’t it.

He wasn’t talking about that. He wasn’t interested in some historical examples. He was talking about something more basic and down-to-earth.

“But if you still don’t like the idea of fighting to the death, you should have gotten involved way back when the rules were being made and there was a chance to choose one of the countless ‘right’ answers through nonviolent means. That is where you should have fought your battle. But you didn’t put in the work and you ran around foolishly assuming for no good reason that no one was going to die on that battlefield buried in red snow, so you don’t have the right to complain now. Unfortunately.”

“No.”

Finally, Hamazura spoke up.

The dumb Level 0 spoke to the Transcendent who had accessed divine specs.

He couldn’t accept it, but he did feel like he finally had a general idea what she was saying.

He finally had a handle on the goal he truly had to fight for.

He had to face this strange feeling head on.

“There are different forms of justice out there. On its own, that sounds like a testament to the wonders of diversity. But that doesn’t mean you can just casually shift from one idea of what’s ‘right’ to another. Choosing whatever version of ‘right’ is most convenient at the moment is the same as getting a stomachache, fearing it’s something serious, and, instead of going to the hospital, searching online until you find something saying it’s nothing to worry about. All you’re doing is choosing whatever opinion tells you to do what you already wanted to do.”

More than that, it wasn’t something to be determined by whoever could punch the hardest. Wouldn’t that just lead to a dystopia where whoever was the strongest got to bend everything to their will?

He found Blodeuwedd the Bouquet grinning in front of him.

“How interesting. Hee hee☆”

“…What is?”

“Oh, just that you keep going on about how much you hate justice, but in the end you just want to save people too. …I am the Transcendent who loves and saves all of the hated, so I’m used to people who can’t be honest with themselves☆”

“That’s not what this is…”

He couldn’t look her in the eye.

Hamazura didn’t long for justice from the side of evil like Coronzon had.

He quietly spat out a response.

“It’s not like you have to be on the side of justice to save people. Bad people can shield people from bullets too if they move in the way. Saving people is nothing more than a physical action.”

“Hmm, so close.”

“?”

“You’re not quite there. But it’s not bad. Hamazura, you really do hate goodness and justice, don’t you? You hate those mindsets that lead people to take lives. That’s a good start, so explore this a little further. You will find something if you do. Although this is more Aradia’s territory than mine.”

He didn’t understand.

Also, who in the world was Aradia?

“Now, I need to know what your plans are. You’re not interested in fleeing to the farthest reaches of the world and curling up there where you’re safe, right?”

“Right.”

“That Black_Oneday hacking tool is super bad news. We can’t ignore it. So are you going to protect Academy City’s peace and safety in your own twisted way?”

“That about sums it up.”

…Or did it?

Hamazura still wasn’t certain if this would help Coronzon in any way. But he felt like what the Black_Oneday user would do was completely different from the destruction she had tried to accomplish.

“Either way, we’re the only ones who know that hacking tool is out there. So we can’t just let the Black_Oneday user have their way.”

Part 4

“Damn those Anglicans. Did they make a big commotion and then take down their own people-clearing field?”

Leivinia Birdway grumbled in annoyance.

The large lobby of the international airport was a mess from end to end.

There was a mysterious hole well over 10m in diameter in both the ceiling and the floor. Those likely came from something falling straight down from the sky above. All the windows were shattered and the glass-covered floor was littered with crow carcasses… It was all about as bizarre as it could get. It was no surprise that Anti-Skill and curious onlookers had shown up.

Kamijou Touma couldn’t get close to the wall of onlookers, much less the yellow tape.

He sighed and started up his phone’s camera app. He zoomed in as far as it would go to get a look from a distance.

“Hmm.”

He didn’t see anyone magical like the Amakusas or the Former Agnese Force.

He didn’t see Hamazura Shiage either.

“Looks like the storm has already moved on.”

“Because we were running against the flow of the fleeing people,” complained Lessar. “If we were allowed to knock down those ordinary people, we would have arrived sooner.”

“…”

“Okay, okay, I’m only kidding, so don’t glare at me like that. Heh heh heh. Are you trying to get me wet, you white knight?”

Nothing would teach that inappropriate girl a lesson, so it wasn’t even worth trying.

Was it linked with his phone’s location data? Even Kamijou’s cheap smartphone kept giving him local online news notifications for District 23.

“A new threat brought on by EM waves. Could this be the countdown to the implementation of a bird strike assassination weapon that can bring down aircraft without raising suspicion!?”

“The crow mystery!! Does the truth lie in the mysterious temple rumored to have been demolished to make room for the airport? (Read more)”

“How about some yakitori tonight? Click here for the secret to the most mouthwatering salted yakitori around!!”

The clickbait in the headlines was just as bad as ever, which ironically left him with zero inclination to click. It felt like a hellish caramel made by thoroughly cooking down all of humanity’s malice.

Birdway stared at the distant crowd, stood up on her toes, and stretched her back up…but that still wasn’t enough. She grabbed Kamijou’s jacket, tugged, and made her demand while looking up at him.

“Lift me up on your shoulders.”

“Have you never heard the word ‘please’, tiny little lady?”

He complained, but he also crouched down for her. He began to wonder if he was partially to blame for Birdway and Lessar’s worsening behavior.

He lifted her up.

She was light. And her thighs pressed in from the si-

“Ow! What was that zapping my face? Static electricity!?”

“Hey, I’m wearing synthetic stockings. Winter is a tough time for girls. Ignorant boy, it’s time you felt a fraction of the trouble we cute girls go through.”

How could she be so full of herself after asking him to lift her up?

“(Yes, yes. Now this is prime seating.)”

The girl seated on his shoulders and humming appeared to be in a terrific mood.

“That’s the last place the Anglicans were fighting. Which means Hamazura must have been there.”

“But what’s with those melted holes that must be at least 10m? Oh, god. I bet Academy City is making some dangerous nonsense again.”

Lessar paled and clung to him from the side, probably out of fear. Yes, that’s what it had to be. …Although he wished she wouldn’t press her boobs against him because it was so distracting he was about to lose his balance and accidentally suplex Birdway behind him.

He too was curious about that bottomless hole, but that wasn’t their focus here.

Kamijou didn’t understand what all was going on here, but he was fairly certain Hamazura was near the center of it.

Where had Hamazura run off to?

“If we can’t find him, we’ll have to start by choosing an effective method. And the classics are better than trying to be clever. Heh heh. So it’s scrying time. Or would the term ‘crystal gazing’ be more familiar to an amateur?”

“You’re just trying to sound smart, aren’t you, you smug magician?”

“Oh? Have you finally caught on to the common trait among almost every magician, including Mathers and Crowley? Well, it’s one of the few times idiots with obscure knowledge can feel good about themselves, so let us have this.”

“Also, are you done yet? If you don’t need to see over there anymore, I’m putting you down, Birdway.”

She seemed to deflate.

“Down you go!! I can’t have you staying up there forever!”

“Are you familiar with the idea of a crystal ball?” asked Lessar.

Oh, was that all this was?

Birdway the Genius must have wanted to show off some more, so her mouth formed a small triangle, but there wasn’t time to worry about her feelings right now.

With the weight removed from his shoulders, Kamijou tilted his head.

“A crystal ball… You mean like that thing where a young woman dressed in a sexy fortuneteller’s outfit holds her hands out toward it and sends some kind of power into it?”

“Where did you get that from? In this case, the fortuneteller isn’t sending magic power into the crystal. They’re using the crystal to try and read the small subconscious signs inside their own mind.”

“Also, the ‘young woman’ and ‘sexy’ parts are just wishful thinking on your part. Did you get that stereotype from Japan’s weirdly prolific isekai fantasy industry? Neither of those are necessary for fortunetelling. In fact, the crystal doesn’t even need to be a ball.”

Birdway dismantled a pair of binoculars and pulled out a large lens. She colored that in black with a thick marker.

“All you need is to create an environment where you can intentionally stimulate your inner mind through the medium of crystal, so a lens or a mirror work just as well. The witch’s bible recommends a hand mirror colored black.”

“Wait, it works even if it’s flat and you can’t see through it? That’s nothing at all like a fortuneteller’s crystal ball.”

“Again, that’s a mistaken view drawn from your own fantasies. Throw out that meaningless isekai-inspired image right this instant. And doesn’t this country have that silly rumor about a hand mirror colored purple? Yes, called the Murasaki Kagami, I believe. It’s like that.”

…Kamijou had been fairly seriously disturbed at that souvenir shop when they were talking about condoms and the king of rubbers, but apparently there had been a real reason for that visit. They had been acquiring the everyday items they could use as tools. Pros were so cool.

“I feel like you’re being impressed by the least impressive part of this.”

“Yeah, it feels more like a backhanded compliment.”

When they sensitively reacted to his thoughts, Kamijou decided to leave it at that.

Birdway held the blackened lens between her thumb and forefinger and stared at the floor.

“So if they did pursue Hamazura from here…what exactly does that black lens let you do?”

“Track their footprints,” replied Birdway. She made it sound like she was having to explain that turning the faucet made water come out. “This may be hard for you to believe since you know all about Necessarius’s tyranny, but the Anglicans are more humane than most. They want to avoid harming civilians, so they always use a people-clearing field before launching an attack.”

That term sounded vaguely familiar to Kamijou.

…He was often the one being targeted by the attack, so he had few good memories about the magic.

“So if I can find some footprints that don’t follow the current established by the people-clearing field, they will stand out. Because that tells me they weren’t made by an ordinary person.”

“Oh, that makes sense. If the target would wander on out of the field too, the attackers would end up with an empty field. So the Anglicans’ target won’t be affected by the field.”

“If we want to track down Hamazura Shiage, then we only need to search for tracks that stayed in the field but also don’t show the signs of being a professional magician,” explained Lessar. “It couldn’t be easier. If you can’t pick up a trail like that, you’re not qualified to be a magician. A little piggy like that should drop down to a 0=0 and relearn everything from the ground up.”

“Hey, weakling. Are you trying to ramp up the pressure on me here?”

“Ohh? How about you wait to speak human language until you’ve actually found something, little piggy?”

Birdway stared at the floor and nodded in a way that…as rude as the comparison felt, reminded Kamijou of a dog tracking a scent. It didn’t suit her noble appearance at all.

“Tracking him will likely mean leaving the airport through this exit.”

“Yeah, but isn’t he taking a weird detour?”

They wandered here and there a bunch until they ran into an electronically locked door. Birdway reached between the buttons of her blouse to pull out a card that she had been storing (likely with some difficulty) at her flat chest and held it to the reader, opening the door without issue. Kamijou had questions.

“What is that?”

“I borrowed it from an airport worker.”

“…Using legal means, I hope?”

She only smiled.

The super sketchy magic cabal boss didn’t give him a yes or a no answer.

After unlocking a few more doors, they emerged from the airport.

“…”

Had Hamazura escaped through here?

They were at the back of the airport. Kamijou had wondered what they would find there, but he hadn’t expected to see a small business jet stopped there. He gulped when he saw the Union Jack on the tail wing. The British government plane must have moved here since he last saw it.

“But why?”

“They’re probably transferring cargo. See?”

Lessar pointed to a loader sturdier than a forklift and a few cargo containers.

But these were air cargo containers, so they weren’t the long boxes larger than a studio apartment. They were more like 2-3m silver dice.

And one of them was rattling.

“What the hell? That has the British flag on it, so is it some dangerous magical object? Is it like that Pandora thing you’re not supposed to open?”

“Oh, c’mon. Pandora is the name of the artificial human who opened the box. The box has a different name.”

“Who cares!? I’m asking what happens if you open it!”

Birdway glanced over at the other two arguing and sighed before speaking.

“The report I received said nothing about this container. In fact, does that plane even have a cargo door?”

“Yeah, we rode this plane to Academy City, but I don’t recognize that cargo container at all.”

So it was magical, but it might not belong to the Anglicans?

??? Wait, which was it? And either way, didn’t that mean some extremely dangerous object had just been left sitting out here?

…After all, the Anglicans included some super scary people like Stiyl Magnus. What if they ignored some mysterious secret weapon here and it came after them later on!?

When Kamijou nervously touched it with his right hand, there was a sound like shattering glass.

So…it really had reacted to Imagine Breaker?

Then the metal shutter opened.

“Phew!! I-I’ve finally escaped. I guess I am one of the legendary original Golden magicians. My genius is too much for the world to handle!!”

Kamijou Touma recognized the person who emerged.

It was Dion Fortune.

As the boss of the UK’s greatest magic cabal, Birdway sounded thoroughly exasperated by this state of affairs.

“Aren’t you their Archbishop? Only a temporary figurehead, sure, but what were you doing stuck in an Anglican cell? I thought things weren’t adding up, but did the local troops stage a coup?”

“And aren’t you one of the original Golden magicians? Are you telling me the great Dion Fortune got herself trapped by a twisted loop? Ha ha ha ha.”

Lessar grinned in ultra provocation mode, but Fortune’s reaction was surprisingly minimal.

She only pouted her lips and complained like a small child.

“It’s not my fault. Their necromancer used Underworld God Osiris against me.”

“That’ll do it.”

“Indeed. Not much you can do against Osiris. I mean, he’s Osiris.”

Kamijou waited a bit, but no one provided any further explanation.

Wait, was that the most exposition he was going to get? Was he the only one who didn’t understand? Had he been left behind by the world?

The poor, ignorant boy trembled as he spoke up.

“Umm. Who exactly is this Osiris? Some IT company president who’s popular with elementary and middle school kids on TikZap?”

“Why are you nearly in tears? He’s an Egyptian god. He was originally the god of justice and fairness, but after dying and being resurrected, he became something like the god of death and ruler of the underworld. He’s compared to Hades in Greek mythology.”

“In Crowley-style Magick, the death and resurrection part is heavily emphasized. That lets him correspond to the Son of God who was hung on the cross and resurrected.”

…How could Lessar and Birdway rattle this kind of thing off? Kamijou found it strange. He lived in Academy City of the science side, but that didn’t mean he had memorized all of the Curriculum’s textbooks.

Birdway gave him an annoyed look.

“Bad feelings have a nasty habit of coming true and no one likes being proven right in those cases. Now the Anglicans are looking even more suspicious, but the question is what we do about it.”

“If we can’t trust the Anglicans here in Academy City, is there any reason to even continue with our job? We can always board that government plane and fly on back to England.”

Lessar had a knack for finding something inappropriate to say no matter the circumstances. Which made her a handful. Was there some way Kamijou could search on his phone to find out how to punish someone like her?

“Why can’t I find anything useful!? All I’m getting is some stupid internet slang!!”

“What’s that? Doing some ‘alone time’ net surfing? How pathetic can you be? Why go for mere data when the real, tangible thing is right here☆”

Kamijou could only hope that brat would eventually suffer the consequences of not getting a talking to here and now. Strongly hope.

“I’m not going back,” said Dion Fortune.

In a way, she was the biggest victim who hadn’t asked to be a part of this. She was only temporary. A figurehead. She was supposed to be at the very top, but when it came to Hamazura, all of a sudden she was a target of suspicion, had her authority stripped from her, and was locked up like a criminal.

But she didn’t hesitate to raise her voice here.

“I have to save him. If this is allowed to continue, the Anglicans will kill Hamazura! Even if no one recognizes it, I am still the Archbishop. I won’t let my people trample on people’s lives like that!!”

A soft sigh came from Birdway, who usually maintained a harsh viewpoint.

The sigh had an exasperated tone to it.

“So you’re motivated, great. But do you have a realistic and concrete plan?”

“…I do have one idea there.”

Part 5

“Tch.”

“What’s that tongue click for, Blodeuwedd?”

“Oh, nothing. How do you do, Hamazura-san? Oh, dear. You have some trash in your hair.”

“???”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet came up with an excuse to snatch something from his hair, crush it between her fingers, and toss it aside.

(That was a transmitter smaller than a grain of rice based on a communication spiritual item. Whether or not they could pull it off, would Dion Fortune be the only one among the Anglicans who would come up this kind of idea? And she has spent the most time with Hamazura Shiage among them.)

But that aside, they had walked a bit – a good bit – from the airport.

Below the open sky.

“Aneri says this area is most suspicious.”

“I don’t know what it based that conclusion on, but if Aneri-tan says so, maybe it’s true. Doesn’t it worry you that you don’t know what calculations the AI is doing on the inside?”

As long as it was convenient, he didn’t really care. …But did he only see it that way because he lived in a city of science worship?

Hamazura and Blodeuwedd the Bouquet had arrived at a fairly special part of District 23. Special enough that it was on every single tourist map.

It was filled with aircraft.

Except they were packed in close. And there was no rhyme or reason to where they were stopped. Even if they were being maintained or refueled in preparation for takeoff, this haphazard arrangement would leave each individual aircraft unable to move.

But that wasn’t a problem since the aircraft here were all retired.

“Hm. So they took retired airplanes and space shuttles and restored just the residential portions to make hotels, villas, and such out of them?”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet took a look around and commented in amusement, as if she were viewing a tourist attraction.

Hamazura walked past a parked tanker truck and toyed with the cracked phone in his hand.

“It’s called Hotel Town.”

“More info from Aneri-chan?”

Correct.

It may have been like the “towns” made from trailers found in the American desert…but these were small business jets and even large passenger planes. The scale was on another level entirely. It covered a wide horizontal area, but the map also expanded in the vertical direction. All the voluminous fuselages and wings acted like large roofs for anyone walking on the ground.

“Gweh,” groaned Blodeuwedd the Bouquet. “These can carry hundreds of passengers, but that’s with them all stuffed into the cramped economy seats, right? Would anyone really pay a lot of money to spend the night strapped into one of those seats?”

“Maybe there are a lot of airplane nerds, or people who really like being served by flight attendants, even if it’s cramped.”

“A paradise for masochists, huh? Well, I guess you can sell anything if you package it up nice. You can even reserve a tour in the sweltering jungle where you get to enjoy a military-style ‘interrogation’ using metal drums and bats☆”

The girl with zero interest in planes stared into the middle distance.

Now, because these planes were retired, people could enter the ordinarily off-limits areas and snap photos with their phones. Maybe there were people out there who wanted to try sleeping in the cockpit or the cargo space.

The food would probably be airplane food (shipped in from somewhere else of course), but the area was kind of smokey. It smelled of oily smoke, like when cooking yakitori. Apparently the people who still felt hungry were having a cookout. There were grills made by splitting a metal drum down the middle here and there. The earthbound passenger planes had ropes and laundry up on their roofs, but wouldn’t the smoke affect them? Seemed like it would make them smell.

“The place is like a maze… And not just in two dimensions. The map extends overhead too.”

“At least we’ll have plenty of escape routes if we need one. Yeah, now this is a tourist attraction for criminals☆”

There must not have been enough boarding stairs to go around because it looked like people were using ladders and stepladders to enter the entrances located higher up than Hamazura’s head.

The ladders were especially useful because they could also function as makeshift bridges when laid on their side. There were several places where two different passenger planes had their mains wings linked by those bridges. The end result was a messy scene.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet walked below one such bridge as she spoke.

She was finally getting to the point.

“So is the Black_Oneday user really hiding in this niche and messy scrapyard?”

“If they’re sneaking around, it means they know they’re up to no good. They won’t be using their hacking tool while hunched over in a large passenger plane stuffed full of hundreds of people. They’ll have secured some larger space they can have to themselves.”

That meant a villa rather than a hotel.

That was apparently what Aneri predicted to be the optimal conditions for using Black_Oneday.

More specifically, something with the large antenna and signal amplifier used to pick up the special frequencies used in the aerospace industry.

The Hotel Town was full of junk, so there were only so many villas for individual use that also had that much major equipment.

And by further narrowing it down using a criminal’s unique desire for multiple escape routes, only one option remained.

“Hmm.”

Instead of a giant passenger plane, this one had a sleek, streamlined design that combined the fuselage and wings into a single shape. It looked like a long, skinny shovel or shield.

The emaciated girl spoke up in amusement.

“What’s that? A space shuttle?”

“A retired one, yeah. The Kujerung exoatmospheric shuttle. Its components can be folded up compactly and transported in a truck and, by attaching an optional solid-fuel rocket, it can be launched from a submarine’s vertical missile launching tube. So says Aneri.”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet looked confused.

But not by the technicality of it all.

“Why would you want to launch from a sub?”

“Don’t ask me. Maybe they’re already doing stuff outside the atmosphere they don’t want anyone to know about.”

What an awful age they lived in.

If there really were space aliens, they would see that as unforgivable pollution. It probably wouldn’t be long before they showed up to eradicate humanity so none of the dangerous species could leave the Earth.

As an act of good to protect the rest of the universe.

And while this was strange super technology for Hamazura and Blodeuwedd the Bouquet, it was no more than retired scrap for Academy City. Those arbiters of justice really did like looking down on people, didn’t they?

At any rate, it looked like a small fashionable streamlined jet. It could switch between a jet engine that sucked in air or a rocket engine that used an oxidizer, giving it the extreme engine power needed to fly from runway to space…but they could ignore that since this one was grounded and retired.

How many exits did it have and where were they?

As a spacecraft, did it have thin walls to keep its weight down? Or were its walls sturdy as hell to protect against heat, shocks, and radiation? Hamazura knew a lot about vehicles, but he couldn’t even hazard a guess about something this specialized.

(I know I have to observe it from a distance since I can’t let them know I’m here…but this is so frustrating. If only I could just get the answer right away.)

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet tilted her head and gestured as if looking at something from below.

“Its basic design is the same as an airplane, right? So can’t we get in through where the wheels are?”

“Are you Kinuhata? This isn’t a cheap movie… There are too many huge-ass gears crammed in there for us to fit.”

What he could tell from enough of a distance to not be noticed was that it was about the size of a small business jet.

…That meant the main problem was the height of the door. It was up higher than Hamazura’s head, so breaking down the door and storming inside would be difficult.

“But on the other hand, the enemy won’t be able to see us if we’re directly below the fuselage, right? Looking down from the cockpit and side windows doesn’t let you see there. So if we can just get there, we should be able get close without being noticed.”

“And then what? And then what?”

“We can walk to the very back of the shuttle and set up a ladder to get up on the roof without them noticing.”

There were ladders all over the Hotel Town. There weren’t enough boarding stairs to go around, so the ladders were used instead. They only had to borrow one of those.

“Prying open that smooth side door would be tough, but if we walk along the roof to the cockpit at the nose, it should be possible to break the glass and get in, don’t you think?

“Are you sure that’s a good idea? We’ll be climbing on top of that streamlined roof shaped like a squat metal coat. We won’t just roll right off, will we?”

Apparently Blodeuwedd the Bouquet sounded so unusually concerned because magicians couldn’t fly.

But Hamazura didn’t understand the rules ordinary magicians worked under, so he wasn’t sure how to respond to this nervous confession.

“Also, this is a spaceship, right? Won’t the front glass be super sturdy to deal with space debris and the pressure difference with the vacuum? How are you planning on breaking that? Ask me to do it?”

“If we can’t do it ourselves, we just have to make a tool that can.”

Part 6

Kamijou tried to organize the information in his head.

The tracker Dion Fortune had attached to Hamazura said he was in the Hotel Town, a lodging area of District 23.

Although Fortune herself didn’t sound too confident.

“The thing is, the signal has vanished. That’s a bad sign. Did he notice the tracker and crush it?”

“Doesn’t matter. Even if he gets away, we just have to pick up his trail again in the Hotel Town.”

Kamijou’s phone beeped.

Was that Board Director Accelerator? Where was he watching this from?

“Hey. This is only going to get worse if the supposed problem solvers don’t do their job. So get your asses to the center of the commotion. If those annoying outsiders keep causing so much trouble, the damage is only going to spread.”

The Brits spoke up before Kamijou could get his mouth open.

“Keh keh keh. You say that it like it’s a foregone conclusion he’ll help you.”

“You trust him a lot, huh?

“Do I need to grind the both of you into mincemeat together, you damn brats?”

Accelerator’s voice dropped by two tones. Once for each girl.

And when had those two gotten to the point they could tease the #1? Did they feel no fear?

Kamijou tilted his head and joined the conversation.

“The Anglicans are one thing…but why is Hamazura still on the run? He’s being pursued by magic side experts, right? I don’t see how he could possibly defeat Stiyl and Kanzaki.”

“From what those Anglicans say, he has a Transcendent helping him out. One named Blodeuwedd the Bouquet.”

“Oh, her… Yeah, that tracks,” muttered Kamijou.

Birdway and Lessar didn’t seem too concerned…but was that because they had no direct experience with Transcendents? They didn’t react the way Dion Fortune did.

“The Anglicans have another one called Good, Old Mary with them,” said Accelerator. “Do they think that makes it even? Slamming brute strength against brute strength is only going to damage their surroundings more. We’re busy trying to turn this pile of rubble back into a city and then they show up in the sandbox ready to smash our sand castle.”

He had a point, but this meant his privileges as Board Chairman weren’t enough to bring an end to the conflict.

Birdway frowned again.

“Do you know anything about the Anglicans’ odd behavior? You’re the top of the science side, so you should have some amusing arrangements in place for diplomatic purposes.”

“I’m in the dark on this one. Which I do not appreciate when this is my city.”

Accelerator spat out that last sentence.

Kamijou glanced over to see Dion Fortune shrugging.

This meant the leaders of Academy City and the Anglican Church had been forced out. …Then who was in control here?

“Whatever the case,” continued Accelerator, “specialists will feel the fear of something on a deeper level than anyone. Like America with guns and Central America with drugs, the UK knows all about magic and demons, right? They’re more sensitive about these things. Isn’t that why they’re taking this so far?”

“But what does that have to do with Hamazura?” asked Kamijou. “I mean, he’s an Academy City esper. That’s a completely different world from the magic side.”

“The Great Demon Coronzon problem isn’t over yet.”

“?”

Why bring up Coronzon here?

For better or for worse, Kamijou had ended that by killing her with his own hand.

“The Anglicans seem more concerned by Coronzon’s lingering effects than by Hamazura himself.”

“Lingering effects? Oh, I get it.”

“No, you don’t.”

If Hamazura Shiage’s view of Coronzon were accepted by the public, Coronzon’s apocalyptic ideology could end up spreading? Or something like that?

But apparently that wasn’t what Accelerator meant.

“It’s something about angels and demons being made of energy. They theorize that, even after Coronzon’s death, a portion of her power is contained inside Hamazura Shiage. …If that’s true, then he would be able to use Adikalika himself.”

“Sitra Achra,” said Dion Fortune, sounding unusually grave.

That didn’t mean anything to Kamijou, but apparently it meant something to someone.

“Misaka will do it!” “Serving master is my job.”

Some voices came over the call.

Only Accelerator could know what he thought about that while hearing them in person.

“The trouble at the airport is bad enough, but it sounds like this is about to be spread further.”

“Don’t worry. We reclaimed our ordinary lives. I’m not about to let someone bring us to the brink of ruin again.”

Part 7

Maybe it came from being a scrapyard for retired aircraft, but there were stacks of wooden crates and metal drums all around the Hotel Town. There was junk and scrap metal just about everywhere.

For a tinkerer like Hamazura, it all looked like a giant armory.

He started with a metal pipe and a stake, added some quick-drying putty in place of a rubber seal, grabbed a spare electric plug, included a few other small items, and finished it with the most important piece of all.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet tilted her head.

“Hmm, what’s that tube? What is that used for, Professor Hamazura?”

“It’s a signal flare. It might look safe, but it actually includes more powder than an ordinary 9mm round.”

There was probably more powerful jet fuel and rocket fuel to be found in District 23, but he would prefer not to touch anything that dangerous. It was best to stick with materials he was more comfortable with. He took apart a few of the flares to get sufficient powder.

After combining everything just right, it was done.

It rested on his shoulder like a rocket launcher…but it was more like a pile driver powered by explosive force.

He would use this to break the space shuttle’s thick front glass designed to withstand space debris and the pressure difference with vacuum.

“That should do it. We only have one shot at it, though.”

“Are you sure about this? Won’t a space shuttle have other ways of seeing out? Y’know, like exterior cameras installed all over it. I just don’t think this will work like a normal plane.”

“You have a point. Then let’s deal with that.”

That led to more rummaging around behind cover.

The emaciated girl stared like she had discovered a new kind of insect.

“Professor, Professor. Um, why are you gathering up filthy old cardboard boxes?”

“For kindling.”

With so many homemade grills all over the place, it wouldn’t stand out much if a bunch of smoke obscured the view from the exterior cameras.

He gathered together all the cardboard and then shoved it into an 18 liter drum.

Incomplete combustion would be best for creating a smokescreen, so he wet the cardboard a bit with water before lighting them. Oil would have been useful, but he was afraid of it sputtering all over the place when mixed with water.

Dark smoke dirtied the air and began to ride the gentle breeze.

It fully engulfed the streamlined fuselage of the Kujerung a short distance away.

Now the exterior cameras weren’t going to accomplish much.

“Let’s go! Don’t get lost in the smoke!!”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Hiding in the thick smoke, Hamazura held a collapsed ladder under his arm and approached the Kujerung. It was a nerve-wracking situation, but Blodeuwedd the Bouquet seemed to be enjoying herself. …Like a mom watching her small child during parent’s day at school.

“Phew.”

They made it below the Kujerung. It was low enough he had to duck to not hit his head, but it was still a safe zone where they were free to move.

He took a deep breath of the smoky air.

Three seconds passed without any reaction from the Black_Oneday user. Concluding they hadn’t been noticed, the two of them made their way to the tail of the spaceship.

“Did you make too much smoke? It’s stinging my eyes…”

“That’s better than being seen.”

While it was only the size of a business jet, it was still an exoatmospheric shuttle designed to take off from a runway and fly all the way into space. Three giant trumpet-shaped engine nozzles were arranged at the rear. Each one was taller than Hamazura. He knew it was retired and wasn’t functional anymore, but it was still frightening to be staring them down like this. The pure firepower would be greater than at a crematorium.

Hamazura extended the stepladder as far as it would go and leaned it diagonally against the shuttle. Climbing that would take him to the roof. Then he only had to walk up to the cockpit window.

“Okay, here goes nothing. …Follow me, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet.”

“Oh, how gentlemanly. I thought you would use ‘ladies first’ as an excuse to have me go ahead of you.”

“?”

“It’s your chance to get a low-angle view, you know? And I’m naked save for an apron below my metal coat☆”

Hamazura knew that veering even slightly to the side on the roof would mean slipping off to his death, so why was she trying to distract him like this? Was she really on his side?

At any rate, he climbed the ladder while staring down the giant trumpet-like engines.

But then he realized something.

“Hm? What is it, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet?”

Before reaching the roof, her hands only partway up the ladder, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet stared off elsewhere and muttered to herself.

“Hmm, that’s not good. Things have finally caught up with us.”

He wasn’t sure what she meant at first…but that didn’t last long.

Something wasn’t right.

“There’s no one else…around here?”

In the cluttered Hotel Town? When each of the passenger planes that made it seem so cluttered had to contain hundreds of passengers?

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet took a quick look around, her gaze sharpening a bit.

“It’s a people-clearing field. And the Anglicans have us surrounded a lot more boldly than I expected. They should really be less conspicuous about laying that kind of groundwork.”

“?”

That didn’t mean anything to Hamazura, but apparently all the innocent people had intentionally been made to leave.

The “atmosphere” of the entire area had changed and the hiding Black_Oneday user had to have noticed it. Which meant they would be on their guard. He couldn’t predict what the enemy would do next. Were the Anglicans a bunch of bumbling cops!? Did they even want to solve this case and bring peace back to the world!?

“This is bad, Hamazura.”

“?”

His phone sounded the alarm again. The loudest one it had.

The threat was right there, as close as could be.

He heard a rumble from the Kujerung’s giant engines just before they ignited.

Part 8

Kanzaki Kaori and the rest of the Anglicans were prepared for their next action.

The Amakusas and the Former Agnese Force ran all around.

There were many innocent people in the Hotel Town, so they had to be evacuated in advance using a people-clearing field and other spells. It was a lot of work when covering such a wide area.

Kanzaki looked grim.

“We may have underestimated that AI Aneri thing. If Hamazura Shiage can accomplish this much, we need to recalculate the threat he poses.”

“At least there is still no sign of him directly using magic,” said Itsuwa before glancing to the side. “And at the same time…”

(I can’t believe she took a direct hit from that and it didn’t even scratch her.)

She meant Good, Old Mary.

That Transcendent had apparently been hit by a science side strategic weapon, but she was standing there like nothing had happened. She claimed to have immediately mixed together a potion that created thick concrete upon contact with the air, but was that really enough to explain what happened?

(Well, cement was often used when building large sacred grounds, like the pyramids of Ancient Egypt or Roman temples.)

Anyway, the Anglicans had two main concerns.

First, that Great Demon Coronzon’s Sitra Achra power had been sealed inside Hamazura Shiage as a Telesma-like energy.

Second, that Hamazura Shiage’s mistaken proselytizing and evangelizing would spread an apocalyptic ideology in support of the already dead Great Demon Coronzon.

The first was the more direct threat, but the second couldn’t be underestimated.

Coronzon’s name was already well known, so it was incorporated into various parts of the magic side.

The Anglicans, the Amakusas, and the former Roman Catholics were a group bound by faith, so they saw the possibility of Coronzon being spoken of as a hero as a definite threat. They knew better than anyone that formless and abstract faith could transform into an international military force. Because that was what they were.

A Level 0 had gained an exceptional power.

That symbolism reminded them of a different boy. And that other boy was proof that a perceived threat to the world could bring together people from different nationalities and affiliations.

…They couldn’t let that incidental phenomenon be used in a negative way. No matter what.

(A demon…a dragon. I don’t like the symbolism. And Hamazura Shiage is also officially classified as a Level 0. Let’s just hope he doesn’t have anything weird lurking in his right hand.)

“We will capture Hamazura Shiage here in District 23. That way we can keep his influence to a minimum.” Kanzaki spoke cautiously. “Academy City is known as a city of espers, but it’s said most of those espers are Level 0s who never developed any real power. That means there are a large number of people here whose development failed, leaving them frustrated with the current world. We must avoid a situation where they resonate with Hamazura Shiage…or with Coronzon’s shadow, really.”

Academy City’s technology was said to be twenty or thirty years ahead of the outside world.

The same was said of its trends.

So if Academy City was lost, there was a chance the same would happen to the world as a whole once, sooner or later, it spread outside.

That was yet another reason they couldn’t let Coronzon’s apocalyptic ideology take root in Academy City.

“No sign he’s noticed the people-clearing field. He may not be used to using Great Demon Coronzon’s Sitra Achra inside him, or maybe he isn’t even aware it’s there.” Kanzaki remained cautious. “So it would be best to secure him while that safety remains. If he can wield Coronzon’s magic alongside that AI Aneri, we truly won’t be able to keep up.”

Part 9

The Kujerung exoatmospheric shuttle’s three giant trumpet-shaped engines suddenly ignited.

“Gah!?”

There was nothing Hamazura could do while climbing the ladder leaning against the rear of the shuttle. Ordinarily, he would have been turned to charcoal by explosive flames even more powerful than a flamethrower.

Directly below him, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet grabbed his ankles and yanked him down. He fell straight down where she caught him inside her thick metal coat.

Hamazura’s view was blocked while he was enveloped by a sweet aroma, so he didn’t actually see what happened.

He just knew gravity suddenly vanished.

He heard a deafening roar and felt a great tremor.

He fell over with no idea what was happening. Blodeuwedd the Bouquet’s head was outside the coat, so she had to see what he couldn’t.

“Ow ow ow… Okay, that one was a little too close for comfort.”

Then why did she have a tone of voice best described as “tehepero”?

When she reopened the front of her metal coat, Hamazura collapsed to the ground. And they were at a spot that had to be more than twenty meters from where they had been. As hard as it was to believe, their combined weight had been launched that far before even touching the ground.

He noticed some drops of a strange glowing orange liquid nearby.

It took him a fair amount of time to realize those were pieces of molten aluminum…in other words, the remains of the ladder. It must have been splattered like a shower over a wide area. If not for that magician (or was she a Transcendent?) wrapping him in that inexplicably sturdy coat, what would have happened to his puny physical body?

But that wasn’t the main point here.

Without even getting up from the ground, Hamazura clung to the girl’s slender body inside the coat.

“I thought the Hotel Town was a scrapyard full of retired aircraft! Why does that thing’s engines work!? You can’t run it on ordinary gasoline, that’s for sure!!”

“Wait, Hamazura. Don’t focus on that right now. …If that one is operational, could it be that all the others are too?”

“!!!?”

The Black_Oneday hacking tool was specialized for the aerospace industry and it bared its fangs here.

Hamazura was hit by a spell of dizziness and nausea.

All the movement around him had caused his inner ear to malfunction.

Meaning…

The countless large passenger planes supposedly acting as giant hotels were…

“They’re moving… Goddammit, they’re coming this way!”

He had no choice but to run.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet seemed amused. He couldn’t figure out her sense of humor.

“Ah ha ha ha ha!! Hey, Hamazura, how much does a passenger plane weigh!?”

“Depends on the plane!!”

It really did depend.

He was pretty sure the biggest ones were more than 500 tons. A large truck was around 10 tons, so it was literally an order of magnitude greater.

“Why do these retired aircraft all still have ultra-dangerous jet fuel in them!?”

“Maybe it’s that thing? Y’know, that idea that machines need to be operated periodically or else they fall apart.”

…Come to think of it, hadn’t he seen some tanker trucks on the way here? He had been terribly unobservant. Those trucks wouldn’t have been here if the aircraft didn’t need jet fuel.

Running away on foot wasn’t going to cut it.

They both rolled well to the side on the ground.

A great mass passed right by them with the unpleasant odor of burning rubber.

But barely avoiding the passenger plane’s giant wheels didn’t mean the threat was over.

Plus, this was District 23, where all the aircraft and spacecraft were located.

The passenger plane slowly pursuing the two of them was smashed by something arriving from a different direction. It was squashed by something from above.

Something big.

The (remains of) a small charter plane and a pointy-nosed supersonic passenger plane were crushed from above and shoved aside as something truly colossal approached.

The oppressively large fuselage seemed like it could contain three large passenger planes stacked on top of each other. At that size, you had to wonder if the air resistance calculations really worked out for it or if it would break apart as soon as it took flight.

There was a good reason for its size.

The Whale Shark large structure component transport plane was an extra-large aircraft designed to carry the dismantled parts for an entire ordinary-sized aircraft or spacecraft!

It was large enough to play a regulation game of basketball inside. Nothing crushed by its enormous low-pressure tires would ever recover. A human would be squashed less than 5mm flat.

And its great size wasn’t the only problem.

The air moved with a rumble. Quite literally. Sending a mass weighing hundreds of tons into the air required a considerable amount of force. And the giant barrel-like turbofan engines needed to intake a considerable amount of air!?

“Gyahh!!”

When one of the aluminum ladders used to create a path between the airplanes was sucked in, the entire cylindrical engine burst into flames. This was the same accident seen with bird strikes, but the Whale Shark didn’t stop. It had more than the one engine, so it was still charging this way!!

“Run away!!”

“Ah ha ha! To where!?”

“Its tires are too big. If we escape into an indentation, it won’t crush us!! Aneri, search the map to show us where to go!!”

Hamazura shouted and glanced down to his cracked phone and then dove toward a chain link cover on the ground. And he lifted it.

Something like the ditch next to a road continued on in a straight line. It was probably meant to stop any highly-dangerous spilled jet fuel from spreading endlessly along the flat ground.

But this ditch was more than a meter across.

“Wait, Hamazura. My metal coat is way too baggy so it’s caught…”

“Oh, god!!”

His eyes widened as he yanked her on in.

That colossus was large enough to carry an entire passenger plane inside. Any contact with that mass would mean instant death and it was passing only a few centimeters over their heads.

Hamazura raised his head and shouted half in desperation.

“Well, it’s not all bad!!”

“It isn’t!?”

“They’re causing a lot of trouble, sure, but it looks like they can’t actually escape into space!!”

The Black_Oneday user was the one activating the aircraft and siccing them on Hamazura or the Anglicans, but they showed no sign of taking off with the Kujerung exoatmospheric shuttle and escaping that way. While the Kujerung was a spacecraft, it needed a runway of more than 2000m to take off from the ground, so igniting its engines wasn’t enough. And it didn’t seem to be equipped for the “launched vertically from a submarine” option.

If they couldn’t escape from the planet, then they remained on this same battlefield.

Hamazura couldn’t let all this chaos distract him.

The Black_Oneday user was behind all of this and they were within reach!!

Part 10

Everything started to move all at once.

The aircraft and spacecraft in the Hotel Town were moving haphazardly.

Kamijou’s eyes widened.

“What the hell!?”

“If AI Aneri isn’t doing this, then the enemy must have a similar tool.”

Lessar made it sound like it wasn’t her problem.

“Like what?”

“I dunno, maybe a specialized hacking tool?”

“Wait, hacking? Then what about searching for my document!? They aren’t going to destroy the cargo management database that tells me where it is, are they!?”

Also, who was the enemy here?

What did they think they were doing with some underground hacking tool!?

There wasn’t just 10 or even 20 of them. Large passenger planes, military transport planes, and even what looked like space shuttles were moving all over the place. A hit from even one of those would leave him no more than a stain on the pavement.

Kamijou was seriously uncertain if he should charge in or not.

He saw Kanzaki, Stiyl, and some other familiar faces heading toward the center of the chaos. Couldn’t he wait for those experts to fix this and then ask them what was going on?

But even from here, he could tell something was rapidly escaping from here.

Did they need to stop that to restore calm as quickly as possible?

And the others would need as much help as they could get.

“If I capture anyone who looks suspicious, I should be able to figure this out, right? Is Hamazura behind this, or is there some other villain? I’ll have to find some way of- whoa!?”

“You’ll die, so excuse me.”

If Dion Fortune hadn’t kicked Kamijou out of the way, his entire upper body may have been obliterated.

Was that a large military transport helicopter distorting the air as it flew this way? It of course wasn’t actually rotating its two giant rotors to fly under its own power. …A giant arm growing from the ground had grabbed it and thrown it this way.

That wasn’t AI Aneri or the enemy’s hacking tool.

Kamijou’s eyes widened from the ground.

“Wait…did the Anglicans just attack us?”

“Of course they did. You’re working with me, the Archbishop who they decided to unfairly dismiss in the middle of a mission. Nothing is more troublesome than a political enemy you failed to finish off. They now aren’t sure which side you’re on, so they will eliminate you before you can interfere with this mission.”

“…Are you serious?”

He should have realized from the moment he discovered they had shoved their ally Dion Fortune in a cell. The Anglicans were beyond caring about appearances. Or rather, they were acting indiscriminately. Were they really that afraid of Great Demon Coronzon’s influence on the world, like Accelerator had mentioned?

“Is Hamazura Shiage really that much of a threat?” mused Birdway. With a touch of exasperation in her voice.

“He’s supposed to be carrying some kind of dangerous possibility about Coronzon’s power or her apocalyptic ideology or whatever, right!? He saw me kill Coronzon, so he must hold a grudge. Isn’t that why this is happening!?”

“Yes. Great Demon Coronzon is definitely dead, but the theory is that a portion of her Sitra Achra – a Telesma-like energy – remained in this world and is contained in Hamazura Shiage’s right hand. Nonsense. That does seem to be why the Anglicans are pursuing Hamazura, but none of that evil material is here.”

“How can you be so sure? It sounds plausible enough to me.”

“Don’t worry. There’s no chance.”

“But how can you know, Birdway!?”

“Because I’m the one who dispersed Great Demon Coronzon’s lingering energy.”

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

“Wh-wha-what did you just say, you little villain?”

“I went through the ley lines to do it all the way from England.”

He wasn’t asking how she did it.

“There’s no real problem with some of it existing spread out across this entire world. As long as it doesn’t gather together and pass what you could think of as a lethal dose.”

Genius Teacher Birdway could see the obvious confusion on Kamijou’s face.

She continued like she was speaking to a small child.

“Did you wonder why the Dawn-Colored Sunlight, Europe’s greatest magic cabal, didn’t join you yesterday when Coronzon was a step away from destroying the world? Because there were things I had to get done behind the scenes, idiot.” Birdway maintained the calm on her face. “The threat Hamazura Shiage supposedly poses is at least half incorrect. I scattered Coronozon’s Sitra Achra, so none of it is contained in Hamazura’s body.”

“And I have my doubts about the other half too.” Dion Fortune sighed. “Could Hamazura Shiage really draw in enough people to establish a new religion just by telling them about a side of Great Demon Coronzon the rest of us don’t know? It’s honestly possible, but it seems far too unlikely to me. It’s beyond what could happen just by getting lucky.”

That was no reason to relax.

Birdway, who had seen the good and the bad the world had to offer, continued as if to say they were finally getting to crux of the issue.

“Now, why are the Anglicans so dead set on pursuing Hamazura? The Anglicans are an effective enough anti-magician organization that the Dawn-Colored Sunlight must always keep a cautious eye on their activities. And Necessarius is the best of the best. They shouldn’t be behaving like a bunch of bumbling cops.”

Leivinia Birdway summed it all up with a final sentence.

“There’s something more to this.”

Part 11

The villain wasn’t a nameless and faceless being.

They were an ordinary human.

The Black_Oneday user was within Hamazura’s reach.

But the passenger planes and space shuttles weren’t the only threat.

“!?”

He heard something like an electric razor.

One of the wooden crates sloppily stacked up nearby burst from within – probably using some kind of explosive – and something emerged.

The large passenger planes and shuttles that seemed capable of attacking the terrain itself weren’t the only thing to fear.

“Oh, no! Are they sending out drones now!?”

“Hm? Why should we care? We survived a space shuttle engine blast, so what can that little thing do?”

“Use your eyes!! It’s a crop duster!! Do you see the weird nozzle on its underside? Load it with an inhalable tranquilizer and it just has to spray us once from above to knock us out!!”

There was more to fear than pure destructive power.

But how far did the unseen Black_Oneday user intend to take this?

They probably weren’t optimistic enough to think they could stop after scattering their many pursuers. Their hideout had already been compromised. They would want to escape from here as quickly as possible. And they would also want to keep their identity a secret as they did so.

But how did they plan to do that from the Kujerung exoatmospheric shuttle?

“…?”

At first, Hamazura thought he was seeing a small bathtub sliding along the ground. But he wasn’t. The smooth boxy object had three small wheels like a suitcase and the height of each wheel could be adjusted separately to climb stairs and get over bumps. It had made it pretty far amid all the wreckage created by the aircraft crashing into each other. Yes, it moved so smoothly it looked like it was “sliding”.

At that size, it could only be carrying one person. …Was it a tiny mobility device?

“Is that them!? The Black_Oneday user!?”

He was going to lose sight of them like this.

A large transport plane roared nearby. One of its landing gear legs must have been broken because it was tilted at an angle. Its giant X-shaped propeller approached like a rotating blade. Hamazura somehow managed to avoid that and then grabbed onto the diagonally tilted wing. Fortunately, the propellers weren’t rotating too fast. It was moving slow enough for him to climb on.

He would lose sight of the mobility device if he didn’t secure a higher viewpoint!!

“They’re heading west… Aneri, can you stop them?”

After a short buzz from his phone, explosive light burst in front of the mobility device. Aneri must have hacked the guide lights built into the runway.

With the bright light blocking the view, the mobility device weaved hard.

This one attack wasn’t actually going to stop them, but it was still effective.

“Aneri, keep trying things! Don’t just use the same method. Mix it up so the enemy can’t predict what you’re going to do next. Do it!!”

Far below on the ground, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet shouted up at him.

“Hamazura, you pursue the villain! As fast as you can! I’ll deal with all the annoying flies!!”

“Thanks!!”

…So apparently Blodeuwedd the Bouquet could stay standing without issue within the powerful suction of a giant turbofan engine. Transcendents really did have absurd specs. Then again, maybe she had used the huge sleeves of her metal coat to grab and dig deep into the asphalt ground.

Hamazura couldn’t just watch on from up high.

Aneri was obstructing the enemy’s escape, but someone actually had to chase down the mobility device. While running and jumping from plane to plane, he heard an odd sound.

From the ground.

“What the hell?”

He saw a piece of metal about half the size of a coffin, but it had eight wheels. And it had two machine guns thicker than clothesline poles on top. In addition to several plate-like radars and lenses.

The pair of gun barrels were staring right at him.

Hamazura immediately climbed a ladder from the large transport plane’s main wing to the top of its fuselage.

“Is that an anti-air drone!?”

The booming gunfire was terribly deep. The spray of bullets from below filled the main wing with holes. Was that jet fuel dripping out? From the look of things, each shot was a 20mm round even larger than an anti-materiel rifle round. If that so much as grazed him, he would explode and die!

(I’m dead if I stop.)

But at least it wasn’t armed with missiles. With a cheap SAM unit forcibly equipped with whatever missiles were available, he would have been caught in the blast if it hit anywhere near him.

His life really was on the brink if he was thankful he was only being fired on by 20mm machineguns.

The program-controlled automatic aiming hadn’t managed to hit him with a single thick bullet, but he thought that was because those drones were meant to be sent in as a group so they could set up a barrage against an aircraft or other flying object in the wide-open sky. The targeting device didn’t seem to be designed for anti-personnel use.

Hamazura ran full tilt along the transport plane’s roof and leaped.

The next passenger plane’s main wing was ten meters away.

That of course was too far to jump.

He stretched out his arm as if trying to grab at empty air.

“Aneri!!”

Something swung his way.

Had Aneri hacked a red fire truck? That was an extendable ladder being swung around like a tank gun. Hamazura landed on the ladder as it arrived just below him.

He lost his balance…but not just because his weight had overbalanced the extended ladder.

A large passenger plane was approaching. And its engines were sucking in a lot of air.

As soon as Hamazura’s feet contacted another space shuttle’s roof, he heard an explosive boom directly behind him. The hose coiled on the side of the fire truck had unraveled and been sucked into the airplane engine.

The motor sound below him distorted.

The eight-wheeled drone appeared to have crashed into a metal drum on the ground.

The villain commanding it must have noticed.

They made their next move right away.

He heard an odd sound like a liquid splattering.

“?”

It hadn’t actually hit him, but he quickly covered his nose and mouth when he detected the distinctive scent. His instincts sounded the alarm: breathing in too much of this was a bad idea.

(Jet fuel!?)

Was this Black_Oneday’s doing again? They must have misused the fuel ports on the passenger planes around here to spray the dangerous fuel as if from a sprinkler.

To detect the odor, enough must have vaporized to reach this height. If anything set it alight, the entire area would explode. In fact, wasn’t this essentially a tactical weapon that would burn down everything within a kilometer of here using the same logic as a fuel-air bomb!?

“Aneri, find me a route!! Give me the course that will get me outside the vaporized fuel as soon as poss-”

Hamazura stopped before finishing his command.

There was someone down on the ground directly below the main wing.

The scrawny man looked exactly like the type to have taken time off work to come here for fun. He wore an SLR camera around his neck instead of just using his phone, suggesting he was either a serious airplane fan or a serious flight attendant fan. Which one honestly didn’t matter at the moment.

Hamazura’s eyes widened as he ran atop the passenger plane.

(Damn, is this cause of that people-clearing field thing!? Supposedly those Brits use it to keep innocent people away before they do something.)

But that meant the people affected by the people-clearing field would be forced to take action without even realizing it. Their logical thinking would be shunted aside and replaced with the idea that their top priority was leaving the designated area.

Directly below, wooden crates were stacked up in what looked like a small maze from above.

The people-clearing field was a subconscious form of unnatural mental control. So maybe the people under its effects could sometimes get “caught” in a dead end or obstacle or end up looping endlessly in a maze.

On the science side, it was known there was no such thing as perfect technology, but did that apply to the magic world as well?

If the vaporized jet fuel ignited, everyone here would die.

Hamazura’s job was to pursue the villain, but this unknown man had been caught up in this due to no fault of his own.

(Do heroes only save harmless cute girls? Hell no!!)

“Aneri!!”

The nearby fire fighting infrastructure swiftly responded. Several skinny metal pipes emerged from the flat pavement and then sprayed a clear liquid in all directions. Ordinary water would only exacerbate the problem, so this had to be a special fire extinguishing agent meant for oil fires.

Jet fuel that had vaporized and spread through the air was highly inflammable and extremely dangerous, but it wouldn’t trigger an explosion if it was “washed away” with a nonflammable liquid.

“That should do it.”

His cracked phone sounded an alarm.

Hamazura belatedly realized why.

(Washing the vaporized fuel out of the air is important to prevent an all-encompassing explosion, but the threat isn’t over. The puddles of fuel on the ground can still burn!!)

“Damn!!”

Hamazura reached for a laundry rope on the main wing and tossed it below. The attachment for hanging it up caught on the man’s belt.

He attached the other end to a heavy metal drum and kicked that off the other side of the wing.

Like using a pulley, the man was lifted up to the wing.

The very next moment, orange flames engulfed the pavement below.

They had been spared being directly exposed to the sticky flames, but intense heat still rose toward them.

The wing tilted below Hamazura’s feet. Had the rubber of the passenger plane’s low-pressure tire melted?

The specialized fire extinguishing agent took effect before long. After five minutes, the special non-evaporating liquid had covered the fuel, cut off its supply of oxygen, and swiftly extinguished all the flames. The innocent man was safe for now. …Although it did bother Hamazura that the man was excitedly snapping photos of the ground exclaiming how lucky he was to get to see a real jet fuel fire being extinguished.

That said, this had taken five minutes.

Hamazura had instinctually focused on the innocent man over the fleeing villain.

With the obvious result.

“They got away!! Damn!”

The mobility device was no longer visible.

And it was those Brits’ fault again!! He clenched his teeth. If only that people-clearing field hadn’t malfunctioned and got that man caught up in this… He didn’t want to be their friends, but if the Brits would make good use of all that power of theirs, they may have had no difficulty capturing the Black_Oneday user!

“Aneri, check the map!! What’s the closest important place in the direction the mobility device was going!?”

He received two buzzes of refusal. …Yeah, that made sense. If the mobility device had circled around wide after escaping out of his view, it could have gone in any direction.

Which meant they were back to square one.

“Dammit!!”

“Oh, dear… Try to calm down.”

Hearing an awfully peaceful voice, he looked over to see Blodeuwedd the Bouquet using a ladder to climb on top of the same airplane as him.

“But! What are those arbiters of justice even doing!? I could’ve caught the villain if not for them!!”

“Oh, really? And what proof do you have that the Black_Oneday user was even inside that bathtub-like mobility device?”

“…Excuse me?”

“They have a specialized hacking tool, remember? They may have sent that thing in one direction with no one inside while they ducked down and snuck away in a different direction.”

That…seemed unlikely, but he couldn’t be absolutely certain.

And assigning blame wasn’t the most important thing at the moment.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet turned the conversation in a much more businesslike direction.

“So, Hamazura, what are you going to do now?”

Part 12

Kamijou found this to be very bad for his heart.

All the aircraft and spacecraft were no longer moving around, but that was no reason to rejoice. The central figure of all this had gotten away.

“Where’s Hamazura!?” Dion Fortune shouted, wide-eyed. “Please tell me he isn’t dead!”

“Looks like he got away,” said Lessar, carefree.

Kamijou could sense the air of urgency rapidly fading.

Birdway and Lessar were focused on some other villain, so they may not have placed too much importance on Hamazura’s actions.

Fortune breathed a heavy sigh.

“But I don’t see this ‘real villain’ of yours either. You saw that mobility device leave, right? I bet that was them.”

The Anglicans were gathering a fair distance away.

They may have been discussing their next move.

Kamijou spotted the smoker priest among them.

“It’s high time I gave that bastard Stiyl a piece of my mind.”

“Not so fast,” interrupted Leivinia Birdway.

Even though she and Lessar had chosen to act independently rather than join up with the Anglicans in Academy City. Why would she stop him here?

“Have you really not noticed?”

Part 13

At the moment, they needed to get away from the Hotel Town.

And when there were people after them, they had to be quick about it.

Hamazura took a look around.

“It would be fastest to steal a vehicle. And the drones in the sky and things like that can’t spy on us when we’re under an airplane wing…or any kind of roof. So a vehicle that brings a roof with us would be safest.”

“What exactly are you suggesting we steal? Not a highly conspicuous 10ton truck, I hope.”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet sounded exasperated, but District 23 was full of airports and runways. Ordinary vehicles were the exception here. Conspicuous vehicles were actually inconspicuous in this district.

Hamazura pried open the ignition keyhole and messed with the wiring inside.

Anything that belonged to District 23 would have strict electronic security and locks, but large trucks like this moved between districts. And he knew these forceful methods often worked with vehicles that belonged to another district.

(Although this is really the result of reverting to old tech after people opening the door and starting the engine with their phone became a social problem.)

Hamazura bypassed the alarm and started the engine.

“Whatever the case, I have to do what I can.”

“Such as?”

“I haven’t figured that out yet! I can’t ignore the Black_Oneday user, I don’t want to be killed by those Anglicans or whatever, and I don’t plan on letting Kamijou Touma get away with what he did! He kills someone and now he’s the hero who saved the world? I won’t stop until I’ve at least left a mark on his shiny righteousness!!”

“Sigh. So, uh, doesn’t that least one seem kind of impossible?”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet stood right in front of the large truck, looked up at him, and breathed an exasperated sigh.

…So they finally ran into a difference of opinion, did they?

“For one, Kamijou Touma isn’t bound by some rule keeping him from killing anyone. And it wasn’t good luck that let his past enemies survive. In fact, you can’t expect anything like that from that boy and his misfortune. So it was all intentional. He chose to let his enemies live even if it worked against him. But that didn’t happen with Coronzon. Letting the one die isn’t the exception here. To be honest, the way he saved all the others was the abnormality.”

Yes.

He had heard that before, but surely Coronzon had wanted to live.

Even if she was a villain, even if it had been ugly, even if she had brought it on herself, and even if she was hated.

“Besides, a majority of the would would say Coronzon’s death was for the best. So at least when it comes to Coronzon, you can’t possibly overturn Kamijou Touma’s ‘righteousness’. Even if he isn’t interested in being protected by the world’s general consensus. Remember, all 7 or 8 billion people on this planet have a common interest here. Their lives were saved and there is no substitution for that. You’re just one person, so can you do against that?”

Hamazura felt a dangerous heat between his eyes.

“Just one person?”

“She dragged 8 billion innocent people into it and tried to slaughter them all, so the one or two at the center of it don’t get to start whining about justice at this point, you worm.”

“Kh.”

The words stabbed right into Hamazura’s chest.

“Or is everyone you know personally an elite who deserves VIP treatment? Don’t make me laugh. All lives are worth the same. You can’t just shove other’s lives aside because it’s inconvenient for you.”

But still the girl didn’t stop.

Did a running 10ton truck not warrant concern for a Transcendent?

She looked up into the driver’s compartment and continued the head-on verbal assault.

“Every last one of those 8 billion people have their own loved ones and you two were prepared to take those people from them all for your own purposes. And you very nearly did it! Did you think you hadn’t earned the world’s ire after everything you did, Hamazura!?”

Yes.

Hamazura had no right to claim he was in the right at this point. He couldn’t defeat a single person on Earth if he centered the argument there. When it came to righteousness, he was at the very bottom. There were 8 billion people above him in that ranking, so he would be crushed no matter what he tried to say.

He knew that.

He did…but that did nothing to quell his frustration.

He didn’t want to hear anyone say it was for the best that Coronzon died. If her death couldn’t be overturned, then he at least wanted her to rest in peace. He didn’t want people spitting on her grave just because she had been a villain. …Would this world of righteousness and nothing more not even let him think of his friend and make that claim?

And.

“…Hey.”

He heard a horribly low voice.

Far lower than before.

For some reason, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet was furious as she stood tall before the truck.

Even more furious than Hamazura.

“C’mon, idiot. I’m waiting. Aren’t you going to say something?”

“…There’s nothing I can say.”

“How stupid are you!!?”

She exploded at him.

The Transcendents were extraordinary beings who couldn’t even be explained by Academy City’s knowledge of espers. She wore a thick metal coat with only an apron below it, so no one was going to mistake her for a normal person.

And yet…

“At times like this, the idiot who did something unbelievably idiotic is supposed to shout that human emotions can’t be accounted for by adding up the numbers like that! Say that and I’ll make it all work out for you! What do you think a Transcendent like me is doing here anyway!? We let you stick to your personal convictions and tear down those smug arguments based on justice, righteousness, the global majority, international rules, and a global consensus! Why is an idiotic idiot like you trying to take this seriously with that idiot brain of yours!? Are you really an honest-to-god idiot, you idiot!?”

He gasped.

…Whose side was she on?

Hamazura stared in confusion, but this should have been obvious from the beginning.

Hamazura had been cut off from the world at large, so from a purely objective viewpoint, abandoning him would be the safer and easier option. Yet Blodeuwedd the Bouquet hadn’t done that.

Loving the hated was not a safe or easy thing.

But she had still chosen that as her salvation condition.

Chosen for herself.

She had decided she would do whatever it took to save those who were cut off and isolated from all directions because everyone hated them and thought they deserved death.

“Coronzon was evil. And alone! There are 7 or 8 billion people flooding this world, but not one of them would work with her!! Hamazura, she didn’t even consider you useful. She thought of you as utterly useless. And after looking down on everyone around her and driving herself into a corner, Coronzon died a death anyone could tell you she brought on herself. That’s all true!!”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet was fierce.

The Transcendent who had seen so many hated people spoke sharply and piercingly.

So.

Her words managed to tear deeper into this hated boy’s heart than anyone else’s had.

“But you wanted to be her friend, didn’t you?”

“Shut up…” groaned Hamazura, head lowered.

This girl had just suddenly appeared, so what did she know about Coronzon?

…Coronzon had dragged Hamazura, who knew nothing of magic, around Scotland instead of abandoning him.

…She had helped him save Dion Fortune who had collapsed into a bunch of tarot cards!

…She had been more than just someone who nobly saved his life!! She had made jokes, given him scathing looks, and laughed!!!

He hated that he could only manage such a muddy sigh of a voice after remembering all that.

He wanted to be her friend.

No, he had wanted that.

He could only speak of it in the past tense now. He wasn’t an outsider here. He had been there with her, but he had failed to save Coronzon. Even though there must have been a way to do it. He truly hated himself for not managing it.

And yet.

How could this girl look down on him like this?

Even though she she had abandoned Coronzon and protected all the other hated people.

Even though she had sided with Hamazura and thrown out Kamijou because he didn’t meet her condition.

Even though none of it had been calculated and she was only here now on a whim.

Even though none of it had come from “goodness” or “justice”…

“Coronzon was a pathetic idiot who downright sucked at living, but you still didn’t want to call her a great demon and abandon her!! You didn’t care if she was only an acquaintance or what. You still wanted her to have at least one person on her side!! You wanted to be the individual who linked that lonely idiot to the wider world! So why the hell are you letting formless and weightless things like goodness and justice hold you back now? Why do you have to lie about what you believe!? Kamijou Touma threw out that fragile possibility for the sake of the wider world. He made the choice for you without asking first. It doesn’t matter if he was right or not. That boy stole your right to make a choice for yourself!! …So why can’t you at least say you want to get back at that boy who destroyed your illusion!? Isn’t that what you want to do for the person you wanted to become friends with no matter how much effort it took!!?”

“I said shut uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuup!!!”

He stepped on it.

He slammed his foot down on the gas pedal.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet vanished from view in front of the truck. Of course she did. When the 10ton vehicle hit her, she would be dragged underneath it rather than launched forward.

Gasping for breath and sweat pouring down his face, Hamazura finally stepped on the brake.

“What the hell kind of shitty life is this? Dammit, is it finally over?”

Did this help Coronzon? Of course not.

He had thrown out righteousness himself, so what was this explosion of rage even based in? He was so stupid and pathetic and hopeless he had just lost the only person still willing to help him. He hated that he had shaken off her hand, erred, and tumbled down beyond the point of no return.

But then…

“That’s more like it.”

It came from directly below.

The voice’s cheerfulness seemed to ignore all common sense.

What was with that salvation provider? He was in a big truck.

“I knew you could do it, my cute Hamazura-tan☆”

With a roar, Earth’s gravity lost all meaning.

A force thrusting sharply up from below sent the 10ton truck soaring through the air. Although Hamazura only managed to recognize that after it had slammed back down into the ground.

“Khahh!!”

“Hey.”

With the windshield cracked and his view of the world flipped upside-down, he saw Blodeuwedd the Bouquet crouched and peering in through the driver’s side door. The emaciated girl was entirely unscathed after all that.

“We’re not talking about any boring crap about what the world at large thinks. Consistency and contradictions don’t matter. I’m not fighting to get all the riffraff out there to stroke my ego by hitting the like button. Listen, Hamazura. The emotion pushing you onward is everything for you.”

…Yes, that was right.

Hamazura gritted his teeth.

It was ugly. It was pathetic. It was ridiculous.

The 8 billion people who were nearly killed would probably respond with a snort of laughter and tell him he was wrong.

But.

He had wanted to be her friend. He had wanted to get to know Coronzon better.

He finally managed to focus on the center of his feelings here.

But that could no longer happen. No matter how badly he yearned for it, they could never laugh together.

Because someone had decided to intrude, made a mess of things, and converted it all into the past tense.

“No matter how self-righteous and nonsensical it might be, the Transcendent who loves the hated will never tell you your feelings are wrong. I’m risking my life here too, so whatever you ultimately choose as an objective, don’t you forget what you really want out of this. Got that?”

“…Y-yeah…”

She must have liked something about Hamazura’s pathetic and trembling voice because Blodeuwedd the Bouquet smiled and held out a hand.

Not her metal coat’s giant sleeve, but her own overly skinny hand.

“Then come on out, Hamazura. We need to get out of here. Really, it’s your fault for that display of guts. I’m close to loosening up in a number of places and it’s like I’m brimming with power, so this ended up being a little more noticeable than I’d anticipated☆”

…For real? He couldn’t get a read on that tehepero-ing girl’s personality. When she got worked up, did she lose control to the point she would unintentionally throw a 10ton truck?

“How long are you going to hang around in that upside-down truck? You can’t go anywhere in there, so crawling out and walking on your own feet seems like it would be more constructive to me.”

“But where am I supposed to go!?”

“That’s not for me to decide. You need to choose.”

After Hamazura took the girl’s overly skinny hand and crawled out through the broken window, she turned the tables on him.

The Transcendent peered into his eyes and asked the most fundamental question.

“You can’t fight based on what’s right, but what do you want to do about Kamijou Touma who is protected by what’s right?”

Part 14

A lot had happened, but they had to get moving or they would be caught.

So Hamazura and Blodeuwedd the Bouquet walked to an antenna tower a short distance away. The small tower was only about three stories tall, but it did have stairs leading up it, perhaps so it could double as a shelter during a disaster. Which was understandable after the previous trouble with jet fuel.

And as a shelter, it was stocked with water and food.

“Ohh.”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet made an impressed noise when she saw the contents of the sturdy silver metal box. Was this the most excited she had been since meeting him? The box contained bottles of water and a portable food resembling cookies, so was she always hungry or something? If she managed those superhuman actions running off of nothing but water, oxygen, and carbs, then Hamazura would be the impressed one.

After excitedly choosing between the chocolate and vanilla flavors, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet asked a question like it was no more than small talk.

“So what happened with that thing? Y’know, that laser that reflects off the moon. Wasn’t it supposed to fire again after 50 minutes?”

“Bffff!!?”

Oh, right! That thing!

And the laser wasn’t the only threat. District 23 was packed full of dangers, like the mass driver and the nuclear fusion reactor that used deuterium for its tokamak or stellarator or whatever!!

He couldn’t afford to choke and die now. He belatedly took a nervous look up into the sky.

“That’s weird. There’s no sign of a laser from the sky, is there? After being attacked, I would think the villain would want to strike back once they’d escaped. In fact, just one shot outside the country would be enough to trigger a planet-destroying war.”

They wouldn’t be hesitant to use it since they had already fired it once.

Yet they weren’t doing it a second time.

This felt incongruous and inexplicable…which was actually more concerning.

“Hmm. I thought there might be a scientific reason for it. Y’know, like that using Black_Oneday requires accessing a satellite that only comes by at a specific time, or something like that.”

“Is there a condition like that?”

Had Aneri mentioned something before?

He thought he remembered something about a large antenna or a signal amplifier.

He hadn’t made it inside the Kujerung exoatmospheric shuttle they used as a hideout, so he didn’t actually know what kind of computer they used.

But the Black_Oneday user couldn’t have been using much equipment while escaping in the bathtub-sized mobility device at least.

“I see.” For some reason, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet sounded convinced. “If there’s no explanation from the science side…then could Black_Oneday’s usage condition involve the logic of the other side?”

“?”

He didn’t know what she meant, but that was true of about half of what this Transcendent said while moving on ahead of him. And if her explanation wouldn’t clarify anything for him, he would just have to put off understanding that part.

So from his perspective…

“I’m also curious about those damn Brits.”

“What about them?”

“They don’t even know about Black_Oneday. They think it’s all me and Aneri, so how did they know to come to the Hotel Town?”

District 23 was a big place, so he refused to accept they had arrived there by chance.

The Anglicans had arrived, so there had to be some line of information linking the airport to the Hotel Town. But who had linked what?

And that weird precision felt out of character for the Anglicans who had spent so much effort chasing after Hamazura over false charges.

It was like the logic of their pursuit had suddenly changed.

And not just that they had gotten better at detecting his location.

The Anglicans were certainly a threat, but there was something out of place about them, like they weren’t familiar with how Academy City worked. Even with help from Aneri and Blodeuwedd the Bouquet, it was that very unfamiliarity that had allowed Hamazura to escape this long.

But something had changed.

Someone with a sharper and more intimate knowledge of the city was pursuing Hamazura along the shortest path.

That meant an ultra dangerous tracking expert had joined forces with the Anglicans.

He could only think of one possibility.

He spoke the name aloud.

With a shudder.

“Takitsubo Rikou.”

Part 15

“Good work.”

Back in the Hotel Town, Kanzaki Kaori spoke to an expressionless girl in a track suit: Takitsubo Rikou.

“We failed to capture Hamazura Shiage, but this proved the effectiveness of your tracking. We are a group and an organization. By repeating the process, we can wear him down until he must stop. Keep this up and we will catch him eventually.”

“I see.”

They had temporarily worked together during the fight against Coronzon, but Kanzaki saw her as someone who operated under a different logic from the magic side. Kanzaki spoke to her politely enough, but Takitsubo sensed something distant about her.

Or maybe that was the normal way to approach a fugitive’s girlfriend.

Takitsubo thought Kanzaki was a decent enough person for not refusing to trust her at all because of her relationship with the suspect.

…Hamazura hadn’t been informed, but she had actually gone to the international airport in order to see him off in the British government plane. She had never imagined her boyfriend would run away, though.

“But District 23 is a big place, so how did you track him to this Hotel Town specifically?”

“I heard that Blodeuwedd the Bouquet can control pests, so I simply used that fact.”

The track suit girl showed no change of expression.

“For large passenger planes, a wild bird sucked into the engine can be a deadly accident, so there are measures to keep them away from airports. Directional mics are set up across the area to calculate out the precise location and number of birds based on the wavelengths corresponding to the sounds of their cries and flapping wings.”

Whether consciously or unconsciously, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet always kept some of “the hated” around her for protection. In District 23, that meant crows. So by following the unnatural distribution of crows, Takitsubo could determine the location of Blodeuwedd the Bouquet’s traveling companion Hamazura.

Kanzaki frowned a little.

“That does work, but can’t she counteract it if she notices what you’re doing?”

“That’s fine. Then I just change my tracking method.”

It was like the back-and-forth between ECM and ECCM. If having one loophole plugged was enough to fluster her, she couldn’t work as a dark side tracking expert.

When cornered, Takitsubo Rikou was thorough and coldhearted.

“Hamazura can’t afford to give up that Aneri AI, so I could track him that way too. For example, he hid in a parking lot full of forklifts and electric carts when he left the airport, right?”

“What about it?”

“He wasn’t actually hidden at all. He was fully visible from the outside. He was likely acting based on advice from Aneri, but Aneri isn’t running on his phone alone. It's taking in all the data it can from nearby devices and then computing its advice using parallel processing. Any biases in the reference data will lead to biases in Aneri’s advice. Knowing where Aneri’s data comes from will tell us where he is located.”

Aneri’s assistance was convenient and powerful, but it was also a vulnerability. Much like a submarine’s active sonar could give away its location.

And beside that…

“Hamazura is generally a coward, so when faced with danger his first instinct is to get as far away from it as he can. Just like he’s running away from the Anglicans now.”

Kanzaki shrugged.

As if to say you couldn’t expect her to know small personality quirks that only his girlfriend would know.

Takitsubo continued on regardless.

“But then why did he come here to the Hotel Town? Even after running from the airport, he’s still inside Academy City and its tall walls. He can’t leave the city by land. Leaving the air route actually leaves him less able to escape, so he’s chosen a course that will, in the long term, only lead him into a dead end.”

…Takitsubo felt like they had something fundamentally wrong here.

And she knew another of Hamazura’s bad habits. While he generally preferred to run away from danger, if he knew exactly what was threatening his life, he would instead try to defeat that enemy as quickly as possible to eliminate the threat. Once he realized he couldn’t escape was when he would bare his fangs the hardest.

He didn’t do it out of courage or guts. It was more like he couldn’t bear the extreme stress any longer.

His cowardice made him want to defeat his enemy as soon as possible.

But if he was doing that here…then what enemy was he focused on?

“But all the aircraft and spacecraft in the Hotel Town started up,” pointed out Kanzaki. “If he knew about that, wouldn’t he want to find some means of escaping the city by air found outside the strictly guarded airport?”

“Do you really believe that?”

Takitsubo let it slide because Kanzaki didn’t know much about the science side.

But if Kanzaki made the same argument a second or third time, it would be time for a lecture.

“Academy City’s military force was devastated, but it has already begun to recover. That means unmanned anti-air forces like Six Wings attack helicopters and stealth fighters have been deployed. If an unidentified aircraft takes off without permission, I expect it would be shot down almost instantly. …Hamazura is desperate to survive, so he would realize that much at least. He’s so scared he’s more likely to overthink things than the opposite.”

Besides, not a single one of the aircraft at the Hotel Town had taken off.

It also felt off to think that Hamazura had used Aneri to confuse his pursuers. If he only wanted to lose the Anglicans as quickly as possible, he would have gone north from the Hotel Town to reach the maintenance hangars. But he had instead gone west, where there was nowhere to hide.

(Is Hamazura really running away?)

She had her doubts, but she also hadn’t found an answer to what he was doing.

“At least it sounds like we don’t have to worry about you feeding us disinformation to lead us astray.”

“I can still do that if you don’t agree to my terms.”

Takitsubo replied immediately and stared Kanzaki in the eye.

She couldn’t have managed such a quick reply if she hadn’t already made up her mind on that.

“Do not make an on-site decision to kill Hamazura. Take him to England and give him a fair trial. If you can promise me that, I will help you track him down.”

Kanzaki was the one mildly surprised by this.

This helped her, but she still frowned.

“Oh? I expected you to demand a full pardon.”

“I do want to help Hamazura, but that doesn’t mean I am going to spoil him. Besides, it wouldn’t be fair to take advantage of your situation that far.”

She was firm on this.

And she didn’t stop there.

“Now, I don’t know how trials work in England, but I just have to help him win a not guilty verdict, right? If he truly hasn’t don’t anything wrong, that should be possible.”

(What happened to not spoiling him?) (What happened to not spoiling him?)

Itsuwa and Agnese gave identical mental retorts, but neither one spoke aloud.

Takitsubo was also worried about this support from AI Aneri.

Artificial intelligence was a powerful tool. She wasn’t doubting its specs.

However…

“Generally speaking, AI can only say yes.”

That was where her doubts lay.

No matter how flexible it was, an interactive AI would focus on outputting an answer that gave the user what they wanted, so Aneri could be leading Hamazura further and further into danger while complying with his requests.

Especially if Hamazura was attempting some kind of reckless battle.

AI wouldn’t tell you no. It wouldn’t caution you to give up because what you were attempting wasn’t possible.

“In England, someone once got in so deep with an AI chatbot pretending to be his lover that he became truly convinced he was a professional assassin targeting the royal family. If Hamazura has fallen into a similar state, his life is at risk.”

Part 16

Things could hardly be worse.

Takitsubo Rikou, a scientific tracking expert, had joined the Anglicans to pursue him.

What clue was his girlfriend using to track him?

“This maybe?”

Inside the antenna tower that doubled as a disaster shelter, Hamazura Shiage’s eyes dropped to his hand.

To the cracked phone.

To AI Aneri.

…He was the only one who could use that special gadget, so maybe it also acted as a sign. If it was possible to follow the trail he left from using Aneri, it would lead his pursuers straight to him.

Nothing was truly perfect.

Any plus could also act as a minus.

That was true of Academy City espers too…but it was Takitsubo’s sharp mind that let her shift focuses so quickly. She had worked as Item’s tracker, after all. In that world, you couldn’t get away with saying you were at a loss because you couldn’t find any clues. She knew all too well how to track down a running and hiding target.

“Ugh. Does that make my presence fairly dangerous too?”

This was a new reaction from Blodeuwedd the Bouquet.

She sounded somehow apologetic.

…It was true magicians were an oddity from Academy City’s scientific perspective. And as a Transcendent, she was different even among magicians. With so few like her, she could be used to track him. He didn’t know how much Takitsubo knew about the phenomenon known as magic, but there was still a chance she could follow that trail.

“Dammit, Takitsubo’s just too good. There’s a reason I fell for her…”

As a Level 0 who was used to being one of the useless masses, he had never imagined that a special ability only available to him could work against him like this. For a tracking expert like Takitsubo, was an overpowered ability no more than a convenient target to lock on to?

“So what now, Hamazura-chan? You can’t give up your trump card just because it’s dangerous, right?”

“No matter how good Takitsubo is, she’s still from the science side. That means she can’t track things magically. So even if she’s tracking a magician, she only has science to work with. We should be able to stop her tracking by focusing on scientific interference. Aneri! I have one big job for you before you go quiet. Search for any way of scientifically tracking me based on anything other than you – like Blodeuwedd the Bouquet – and block them all!!”

The response came quick.

The seemingly harmless sensors and mics for gathering weather data and preventing bird strikes had all been taken down.

“Come with me, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet.”

The emaciated girl tilted her head.

“You’re keeping me with you? I’m pretty conspicuous, so if you used me as a diversion…you would be free to move.”

“I’m not losing someone as powerful as you at this point. I’m just a Level 0. If I lose what makes me special here, I’ll be one-shotted the next time anything happens.”

For some reason, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet grinned at him.

She also leaned against him from the side…but there was nothing gentle about it with that thick metal coat. And the icy January wind had him worried the copper panels were going to freeze to his skin!

“I see your dependency on me is only growing. Hee hee. Your big sis couldn’t be happier.”

“…You dare call yourself a big sister with that washboard chest?”

“I’ll strangle you.”

They walked a while longer with no surprise attack from the Anglicans…so did that mean they had successfully warded off Takitsubo’s attack?

With Takitsubo stymied, that just left the Anglicans. He decided to assume they were back to being a bumbling army.

But that didn’t mean he could relax.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet reminded him why.

“The actual villain managed to escape while the Anglicans were causing a lot of worthless trouble…but where exactly do you think they went?”

AI Aneri provided several candidates, but there were several of them. They had nothing with which to narrow it down further. District 23 contained far too many important facilities that would be dangerous if hijacked.

Hamazura consciously took a deep breath and tried to restore his calm.

He was about to face the worst case he could think of.

“Black_Oneday is only useful somewhere that runs on the unique code used by the aerospace industry. It isn’t very useful outside of District 23, so I think they’ll stay inside this district as long as they still intend to attack.”

If they could remotely hack from some far distant location, the enemy wouldn’t be in District 23 to begin with. Most likely (even if it hadn’t been revealed to the public), there was a firewall between District 23 and the rest of the city, much like the one between Academy City and the outside world. But if their enemy was physically inside the district, they could ignore that troublesome security.

“But then where are they? District 23 is a big place. It covers both the aero and the space of aerospace, so it’s full of labs for different fields.”

…In that moment.

A normal good person’s goodness would have obstructed their thoughts. But Hamazura couldn’t let that happen. He wouldn’t be able to follow the enemy’s thoughts unless he pushed past any thoughts of “surely not” or “no one would go that far”.

A day ago, he probably would have let that stop him.

But not today.

“The enemy’s Black_Oneday hacking tool is specialized for aerospace. District 23 has all sorts of things, including lasers and a mass driver, but what’s the last thing we would want them to hijack to boost their strength?”

The villain had primarily attacked in two ways in their previous retaliation. First, they hacked the Hotel Town’s passenger planes and space shuttles to crash into Hamazura. Second, they had used various drones hidden in wooden crates.

If those drones had been hidden, it meant the Black_Oneday user hadn’t hacked random drones that happened to be out on patrol. They had acquired those drones from somewhere and hidden them in the nearby crates. In other words, they were spare weapons.

The enemy no longer had those spare weapons.

They may have had other means of large-scale and general attack – including the enormous laser and mass driver – but they wouldn’t have much in the way of nimble defenses. That was like having plenty of swords but no shield, so wouldn’t the Black_Oneday user be concerned?

If so.

What would they most want to put their mind at ease?

Yes, even villains wanted safety. Hamazura knew that after seeing Coronzon.

So he had to directly face the worst case scenario that had first come to mind.

That was where the truth lay.

“Academy City’s automatic aerial division. A drone airbase for weapons like the Six Wings attack helicopter. That’s the last thing we want them to hijack.”

He got it in one.

He had no proof, but he was willing to bet everything on this answer. He was that certain.

“Oh?”

The word spilled from Blodeuwedd the Bouquet’s lips.

That legitimate monster sounded halfway impressed.

“You’re cooking now.”

“?”

“But do you know where this power comes from? You may think you’ve gone so bad you’ve awoken to new power, but this power doesn’t come from evil.”

Yeah.

In that sense, he probably already had the answer.

…This was the power to approach death.

The more he boosted its sensitivity and precision, the more dangerous the bridge that power lured him toward. He knew a few people who had been taken in by that power. That was what happened to Skill Out leader Komaba Ritoku. He had seen Mugino Shizuri drawn in that direction at times. He knew several more among the Kiharas and the dark side. …And maybe Coronzon was another one.

“So we’re headed to that military base next? Think they’ll have better food than this portable stuff?”

“I wouldn’t expect a vacation where you get to enjoy the food.”

The Black_Oneday user had the upper hand. Based on what happened at the Hotel Town, maybe they should expect things to get even worse the closer they got to the drone airbase.

And that wasn’t the only threat.

He had considered this before…and he hated that he hadn’t been overthinking things.

“Hey, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet. Didn’t that stuff at the Hotel Town seem weird to you?”

“Weird how? I’m a Transcendent, so you can’t except me to have an average or normal opinion. It’s a waste of time. I’m confident my answers to any psychological test would deeply disturb you.”

“No, I meant those Anglicans. If they hadn’t done anything, we would have caught the villain.”

Takitsubo’s skills as a tracker weren’t enough to explain this.

Even if she had accurately located Hamazura, she wouldn’t attack so haphazardly if she had a group or organization to work with. She would make appropriate preparations and coordinate the attack. That meant it was the Anglicans who chose when to attack, not her.

Also, the timing of the Anglicans’ intervention had been too convenient.

It almost felt like they had interfered to allow the unseen Black_Oneday user to escape.

Which meant…

Part 17

“They have a traitor.”

She said it.

Leivinia Birdway started with that.

Why hadn’t they joined the Anglicans after arriving so near the Hotel Town?

Kamijou couldn’t believe what he was hearing, but Lessar grinned and gave her thoughts.

“Yeah, the Anglicans are expert hunters, so it is weird that they still haven’t caught that Hamazura Shiage guy who feels more like bait than anything.”

“It makes the most sense if we assume one of the Anglicans is modifying their data or reports to keep them from noticing the real villain.”

The two of them then looked to someone else.

Dion Fortune sighed. In self-deprecation.

“Is that also why they were unnaturally quick to strip me of my authority and throw me in a cell?”

“Exactly.” Birdway nodded. “We can say the traitor is one of the pursuers…and almost certainly one of the Anglicans specifically. And not someone watching on from a safe position from over the sea. Their reactions have been too quick. That tells me it’s someone on the front line here in Academy City.”

Kamijou was shocked.

“Could one of the Anglicans really be bought off?”

“I dunno. Maybe it’s a matter of belief or principles. The Church of Coronzon may be budding sooner than we thought.”

Kamijou still found it hard to believe.

Especially after everything that had happened.

“Wait. Wait! The Anglicans here in Academy City have fought alongside us all this time! CRC, Alice, Coronzon – we fought so many major battles back-to-back here. We couldn’t have won with only the city’s people! Without their help, the world might have been destroyed already!! Why would they betray us and destroy the world right after we avoided it? If they wanted to see the world burn, they would only have had to not try so hard during the fight against Coronzon!!”

The leader of a powerful magic cabal had a simple answer to that one.

“Just because someone was your friend yesterday doesn’t mean they’ll be your friend tomorrow.”

“Kh.”

“We’ve already seen that proven true once: with Dion Fortune. The Anglicans suspected her and stripped her of her authority, remember? That already disproves the idea that they won’t betray someone just because you all fought Coronzon together.”

“Yeah, it was pretty unnatural. Even with Lola Stuart as an example of a traitorous archbishop and even if Dion Fortune was made by Lola, I can’t imagine field troops being so willing to arrest their own leader unless they were being manipulated in some way.”

Lessar punctuated this with laughter. As if seeing Dion Fortune’s downfall amused her.

…Were these suspicions the reason Birdway and Lessar were dragging Kamijou around instead of joining with Kanzaki and the others?

They didn’t think they could trust the Anglicans because they were being “manipulated” by a traitor.

“…”

If that was true…who could it be?

Kanzaki Kaori? Stiyl Magnus? Tatemiya? Itsuwa? Or hospitalized Tsushima? Agnese Sanctis? Lucia? Angelene? Necromancer Isabella Theism?

Who was it?

Who would make the most terrifying traitor?

Part 18

Hamazura Shiage took a deep breath in the small antenna tower that doubled as a disaster shelter.

What was the worst possibility?

By removing all the limiters and viewing the world from the path of evil, the answer should naturally come into view.

So he said it.

“All of the Anglicans officially operating in Academy City are traitors.”

The world tensed.

Now that he had said it out loud, he had to accept it as fact.

And it probably was true.

Otherwise, things wouldn’t keep working out in the Black_Oneday user’s favor so consistently.

Of course, it was weird for all of them to be traitors. Some malicious technology may have been at work.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet muttered something under her breath.

“So, uhh…”

“What? You aren’t going to say you can’t believe it, are you?”

“No, I’m not making an emotional argument here. Although in a way, it is an extremely emotional thing, I suppose. …So, Hamazura, isn’t that answer a really bad thing? Not for any of the formless and weightless concepts of the world or the human race. I mean for you personally. Very personally.”

“…”

She was right.

He couldn’t be acting all smug at figuring it out.

He had forgotten the most important thing.

All of the Anglicans operating in Academy City were enemies.

Which meant…

“Oh, no… And Takitsubo’s right there with them. She’s in trouble!!”

Chapter 3: Justice Doesn’t Have a Monopoly on Peace – Justice_Another.

Part 1

If they could only capture Hamazura Shiage, the situation wouldn’t continue to deteriorate.

Takitsubo Rikou believed that. Strongly.

It was January, so it would get dark shortly after 6 PM. Although District 23 would be lit up by stadium-style lighting due to all its airports and runways.

She was in one corner of the Hotel Town where the arrangement of retired aircraft had greatly collapsed.

She was staring at the tracking data spread out on the hood of a car when Kanzaki spoke to her from behind.

“Have you figured out anything as our scientific tracker?”

“…This mobility device bothers me,” said Takitsubo while staring at the map and a photo.

She was checking over even the smallest vehicle fleeing from the Hotel Town.

“You might not think much of someone stealing one, but those work vehicles are linked to the airport’s internal network. They aren’t like ordinary cars where you can record the unlock signal sent by the key and then open the door with a tablet. I don’t know who was riding it, but Hamazura couldn’t have done that on his own. His usual MO is to stick wires through the door’s keyhole or window and break in that way, but that wouldn’t work here. …Could he have gotten Aneri’s help?”

“Yes. There is apparently a hacking tool called Black_Oneday out there. It’s specialized for the aerospace industry.”

“Wait.”

Takitsubo immediately interrupted after hearing this new information from Kanzaki.

What was this? Where had this information come from?

Not to mention…

“Black_Oneday? If there is a specialized hacking tool like that, it changes all our assumptions. We can’t just suspect Hamazura and AI Aneri anymore!”

“Why not? What is there to consider? All the hacking in District 23 is being done by Hamazura Shiage and AI Aneri.”

“But then how do you explain that mobility device?”

“What is there to explain about it? And if it needs an explanation, that’s your job.”

“…”

There was a disconnect.

She wasn’t getting through.

They were using the same words, but she couldn’t grasp the actual thoughts at the root of the conversation. Someone other than Hamazura was involved in this mess. …But when Takitsubo tried to say so, Kanzaki and the rest of the Anglicans reacted oddly.

Kanzaki smiled as she continued.

“Hamazura Shiage carries Great Demon Coronzon’s power inside him. That Sitra Achra is extremely dangerous. And Hamazura Shiage has been tainted by Coronzon’s way of thinking, so he could spread her apocalyptic ideology. We are fighting to save the world here.”

Takitsubo wanted to curse herself for not noticing something was off while speaking with them until now.

“Honestly.”

With that word, someone else suddenly appeared nearby.

She was a very tall figure.

Good, Old Mary now stood between Takitsubo and Kanzaki.

She was holding a sandwich toaster for some reason.

(That…wasn’t teleportation. …Did she divert the attention of a tracking expert like me enough that I didn’t even see her?)

“I hadn’t liked the look of things earlier, but now I see what’s going on. The hunters have been hijacked by the hunted, turning it all into a charade. That explains why the chase never seems to end.” Good, Old Mary looked disgusted. “But is this brainwashing? No, this feels more like an intentional bias has been applied to a portion of their thought processes.”

“A-a bias?”

“You in the track suit. How would you describe that Amakusa woman’s personality?”

Takitsubo had briefly worked with the Anglicans during pursuit of Coronzon the other day.

As a dark side tracker, she could profile someone after only a short interaction.

“She has a high level of skill, but she is the cautious type. That caution comes from deep-rooted self-recrimination and guilt. She has a complex about her great physical strength and she values her ability to apply the brakes with her rational side. She has a particularly strong aversion to killing.”

“Does she? But when Dion Fortune attempted to contact Hamazura Shiage, Kanzaki Kaori was the first one to launch a lethal attack spell at him from a distance.”

“?”

“And when Blodeuwedd the Bouquet showed up, she said she would feel bad cutting her down the very next day.”

That didn’t fit.

Good, Old Mary tilted her head, her large hat shaking atop it.

“There is an intentional bias to the information in her head. This prevents her thoughts from reaching any information inconvenient to someone. She has become a puppet who will pursue Hamazura Shiage forever without ever paying any attention to the true villain. What part of you was sealed away, Anglicans?”

The Anglican magicians dispatched to Academy City currently lacked the part of them that would protect the people from wicked magicians.

Good, Old Mary adjusted her position to protect Takitsubo, the only other one who was thinking clearly.

With an enemy group, Good, Old Mary could have swept them all aside, but she had accepted the Anglicans as her salvation targets.

(What a pain. That means I can’t abandon these puppets. This righteous mama has her work cut out for her.)

Takitsubo kept right by tall Good, Old Mary’s side.

“W-wait, what are you going to do? Can you fix this!?”

“If their thoughts are being biased by an external source, the symptoms are similar to a charm or confusion effect. Those aren’t particularly unusual in the magic world. In fact, they’re fairly orthodox. Shooting fire from your hand or moving at the speed of sound are supposed to be special exceptions. I should be able to whip up a recovery potion for them. Or if I have to, I could even kill them and resurrect them.”

There was no signal.

Tatemiya wielding a large sword, Itsuwa holding a spear, and many others all rushed in at once. The density of the attack mattered more than their individual skills. It was a surefire method available for a group where avoiding any one attack would lead to a lethal blow from another blade.

So there was no dodging.

Several blades sliced through Good, Old Mary’s neck and pierced her chest.

Not a single drop of blood was shed.

“That was an illusion projected on a cloud.”

Good, Old Mary stood three meters to the right. Holding Takitsubo in her arms.

With a few odd sounds of bursting air, Tatemiya and Itsuwa crumbled to the ground.

“And moisture can guide lightning.”

A decoy and a mine. She had combined evasion and attack into single deceptive maneuver.

But it wasn’t invincible.

The next attack came from behind. Brilliant light and heat scorched the air and stripped away the veil of cloud protecting Good, Old Mary. With the moisture in the air gone, she could no longer bend light and sound.

(Oops. Now they all know how mama appears and disappears so mysteriously.)

While regretting her actions, she turned around to see Stiyl Magnus smoothly emerge. Despite his size, she could not sense his presence right in front of her. She was mildly impressed. Perhaps this was what it took to be an expert witch hunter.

After a soft breath, she whispered to Takitsubo next to her.

“Oh, dear. Get behind mama.”

“Kenaz.” (Fire)

(Hm. Right now I want the hot and dry of the Fifth House which symbolizes summer. In other words, the eighth of the major arcana and the Hebrew letter Tet, so-)

“Thurisaz Naudiz Gebo!!” (Grant the giant a gift of pain)

The tall priest was three steps faster than her, producing a roaring red flame sword and blue flame sword in his hands.

And Stiyl Magnus did not hesitate.

He swung the red flame sword directly toward Good, Old Mary while sweeping the blue flame sword horizontally and triggering an explosion. Even if his target moved away to escape, the explosive blast of 2000+ degree flames would burn and melt them.

Good, Old Mary was an alchemist, so she could extract the basic elements (fire, water, wind, earth, etc.) from any object and use it as an ingredient to create various potions. Even if she could only make something basic at first, she could repeat the mixing process to respond to any situation.

Her greatest advantage was her ability to make the optimal potion for any enemy or problem she faced. But that meant she could be defeated if her enemy kept up the attack and never gave her a chance to mix a potion.

Except…you didn’t actually think that was how it worked, did you?

(Well, it’s technically not wrong.)

But. However. Nevertheless.

“The Prince of Swords – in other words, the wind of wind. Keep him away.”

“!?”

Something unseen surpassed Stiyl’s speed.

Good, Old Mary’s palm produced a compressed mass of air more destructive than a meter-wide wrecking ball.

Its speed was unthinkable. The Bain-marie was an excellent mixing tool, but she still should have needed at least another three steps before she could launch Stiyl back five meters.

She had skipped those three strict steps.

Lucia’s eyes widened in surprise.

“That was fast…”

“You have time to spare to praise mama? You’ll make me blush.”

The next wind wrecking ball splintered Lucia’s wooden wheel. And the nun holding it was thrown through the air. If the north wind and the sun decided to settle their argument by force from the start, it probably would have ended up something like this.

“Eek!?”

Panicked by the sight of her friend sprawled out before her, Angelene launched all of her golden-winged coin bags. Instead of trying to beat her target to death, it felt more like she was frantically raising her hands to guard her face from the ball flying toward her.

(Gold is the seventh circle – that is, the sun – the 19th card of the major arcana, and the Hebrew letter Resh. For the iron ingredient, Helios shall- no, Ra would be easier to use here. Yes, I’ll go with that.)

“Thank you for the gift.”

“Ah!? Wait, Angelene, don’t attack! She incorporates her enemy’s attacks into her spell, letting her skip steps!! The more we help her along…”

The more her processing speed skyrocketed.

Agnese realized what was happening and raised a frantic shout, but it was too late. Good, Old Mary couldn’t complete the complex mixing steps in time on her own, but she could skip three of those steps if she had the enemy help her through the most troublesome parts. She had reached a state similar to a special sauce made by letting a mixture of ingredients sit for half an hour.

(With all their pro spiritual items, pro magicians are like a treasure trove of rare ingredients. Steal, steal, rob, rob…and it’s ready.)

“The Queen of Wands – in other words, the water of fire. Crush her.”

After supplying her coin bags as a mixing ingredient, Angelene was crushed to the ground. Like an invisible false ceiling had fallen on her. It was actually a mass of steam expanding to several hundred times its size in mere moments.

With a burst of quick movements, the magicians encircling Good, Old Mary and Takitsubo shifted their positions. To put a bit more distance between them and the center point.

“Hm.”

When Good, Old Mary held her palm out from a distance, the Anglican who jumped the most was Necromancer Isabella Theism. Which made sense. That dark-skinned girl used various Voodoo poisons and medicines, so Good, Old Mary had to see her like a kid’s meal piled high with child-friendly foods.

Osiris, Hades, or maybe King Enma?

Whoever the necromancer made use of, a divine fistfight would only play right into Good, Old Mary’s hand. That was the perfect field for the Transcendent.

(They’re under the enemy’s control, but they still tense up in fear of pain, terror, failure, and defeat. They wouldn’t care about physical damage if they were affected by complete remote control or internal possession. …So was I correct to think they have only had one portion of their thoughts manipulated?)

Thinking about it wasn’t going to turn up any objective proof. It wasn’t like they had an obvious magic charm attached to their forehead.

While Good, Old Mary repeated those worthless predictions, Takitsubo hid behind her back and asked a question.

“Wh-what now?”

“Mama will do everything necessary to ensure your safety.”

But.

There was no warning.

No light or sound. Good, Old Mary had not let her guard down. And yet the most dangerous magician had already arrived right in front of her.

Kanzaki Kaori.

As one of the world’s fewer than twenty Saints, she could move at supersonic speeds for short times.

(My, is she fast!! But if I mix the necromancer’s poisons and medicines…)

That was when Good, Old Mary froze. Her mixing process was halted. Something unseen sliced through her sleeve and tangled around her arm enough to dig into her skin, restricting the movement of her dominant hand.

(What? Seven…wires!?)

Good, Old Mary was unfamiliar with the name Nanasen.

She immediately used her other hand to burn through the wires with a potion, but that slowed her by a step.

And that one step created a critical opening.

Kanzaki Kaori’s fingers touched the hilt of the long sword at her hip.

Good, Old Mary felt an odd chill on the side of her neck. The blade had yet to be freed from its scabbard, but the sensation of her impending death reached her in advance.

This time, Kanzaki Kaori was not manipulating thin wires.

She truly did grab the katana’s hilt and draw it from its scabbard.

And a single light flashed out.

“G-”

Good, Old Mary’s voice was hoarse.

Because she was aware she could not ignore this damage.

“God. Is that a god-slaying power?”

That attack could mercilessly cut down Christian archangels or some of the polytheistic gods.

It was a hopelessly bad matchup for a Transcendent.

Because they were the highly irregular magicians who dressed up like a god to try and draw on specs equivalent to the god’s own. Good, Old Mary had become a resident of the divine myths, albeit an artificial one, so you could say she had made sure this god-slaying power could affect her.

So she should have died instantly.

“I see,” said Kanzaki Kaori, sounding somewhat impressed.

Given her Magic Name, she would never choose to kill. She had just used Yuisen against a human, yet that was the one thing she didn’t question here.

“Did you combine the Philosopher’s Egg, which can create a potion of immortality, with the Sphere of Sensation, the aura field everyone subconsciously emits much like their body heat or scent? By ensuring new life would well up endlessly within you, you made sure I could not fully kill you.”

But Good, Old Mary was out of the fight now.

Surviving Yuisen was a praiseworthy feat for a resident of divine myth, but this was a last resort like turning your body to stone to deflect an enemy blade. She had lost any chance to move her own body for the time being.

And…

“Ah, ah…”

With Good, Old Mary defeated Takitsubo was now surrounded and alone. Isolated. Because everyone around her was Anglican.

Kanzaki Kaori spoke from directly ahead.

With her usual calm smile.

“Now, let us track down Hamazura Shiage and bring peace back to the world.”

Part 2

Even Hamazura could tell the situation had greatly changed.

If the Black_Oneday user really had brainwashed all of the Anglicans, his girlfriend Takitsubo would be in the enemy’s grasp. And she was a tracking expert with a high chance of approaching the truth of the matter. He doubted the villain would leave her be for long.

(And if Takitsubo of all people doesn’t realize she’s surrounded by enemies… Is this happening outside the world of science? I guess even Takitsubo’s nose for these things can be fooled by magic.)

He couldn’t rest in the small antenna tower forever.

Hamazura needed to rescue Takitsubo somehow, but…

“It’s not possible.”

“Why not!?”

“Because the Amakusas work for the Anglicans.”

He had no idea what Blodeuwedd the Bouquet was getting at.

Who were the Amakusas? She explained.

“They are a sect based on the Hidden Christians who were badly persecuted during the Sakoku era. No one else in the world would be better than them when it comes to running and hiding for a righteous purpose. When they decide to go into hiding, we won’t be able to find them no matter how hard we search. Attempting to chase them down will only give them information on us. And if that happens…”

“Takitsubo really will be in trouble while surrounded by the enemy…” groaned Hamazura like it was a curse.

He most hated his own stupidity. If he had known this sooner, his top priority would have been to stop Takitsubo from meeting with the Anglicans even if he had to use Aneri to find her. Why hadn’t he seen the danger? Because the Anglicans had a monopoly on justice. It should have been obvious even Takitsubo wouldn’t question it if they asked for assistance from their righteous position!!

He had to think.

It didn’t matter how cheap and greedy it was. Everyone could call him evil if they wanted.

He had to think of some way of saving his girlfriend from this crisis!!

“Hey, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet. The Anglicans at least need Takitsubo’s tracking ability to follow me, right?”

“I suppose.”

“That means they have to treat Takitsubo carefully until they kill me. …Killing her will come after that.”

To put it another way, Taktsubo’s life was assured as long as he wasn’t caught.

In that case, he just had to continue running away.

Even if it meant following the path of evil.

“Hmm, that should work. And if we’re being optimistic here, let’s say the Anglicans are being manipulated by the real villain. Defeating that villain will free them from their brainwashing, meaning they won’t be a threat anymore. Won’t that also save your precious girlfriend?”

“…”

Then he knew what he had to do.

It was best to have Takitsubo continue tracking him down. However, he couldn’t let the Anglicans actually catch him. And he had to find and defeat the Black_Oneday user before they caught him.

He knew that.

But he still clenched his fist tight.

Neither Blodeuwedd the Bouquet nor AI Aneri had time to stop him before a dull thud burst out. The boy too stupid and pathetic to be a hero had punched himself in the face.

He had just placed his girlfriend second in his priority list.

He knew that wasn’t right.

It was a despicable decision, but that was the only way he could realistically protect her!!

Part 3

Meanwhile.

Gym-sized maintenance hangars were lined up in an area a short distance north of the Hotel Town.

“Hmm…”

“They attacked us too. Well, nothing happening inside Academy City can trigger a war, so I suppose we can think of it as just barely not crossing the line.”

Birdway and Lessar were speaking to each other while looking at the ground.

Noticing Kamijou’s gaze, Dion Fortune shook her head.

“Don’t expect a detailed explanation from me on this mechanical stuff. Handle that yourself.”

A mess of scrap metal lay on the ground. Shortly before, it had been a 3m multi-rotor drone zipping through the air. Even as scrap, the triple-barreled Gatling gun and short-range SAM pod were still verrrry recognizable. The thing had sent a downpour of bullets from the sky to kill Kamijou and the others.

“This isn’t the direction that boxy mobility device went, is it? Could this be a diversion?”

“Or they just had a spare drone hidden over here.”

Kamijou was sick of it all. He shouted at the top of his lungs.

“What happened to the villain being a magician!? We were just attacked by a drone! And you all saw what happened at the Hotel Town, didn’t you!? The enemy must be from the science side!!”

He didn’t see how he could be wrong.

A hacking tool was being used to cause trouble in District 23 and they were being attacked by machines. There was no room for the magic side there. Wasn’t this a cyber crime committed by someone from the science side – or more specifically, from Academy City?

But.

Birdway shot back at him with absolute confidence.

“Oh? Who ever said magicians can’t hack?”

Part 4

It was evening already?

Once it started to get dark, the winter night arrived fast.

Hamazura knew Takitsubo was in danger, but he had chosen to identify the Black_Oneday user instead of going to her rescue. He didn’t want to waste a moment of time.

“Ugh.”

Next to him, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet glanced at a sign with a simple map. This was apparently a workshop where the cargo containers arriving by plane were loaded onto trucks after inspection. The cargo containers were the dice-like air cargo type, so there was no need for the enormous gantry cranes used at harbors. Here, they used forklifts and loaders instead.

“You suspect the drone airbase, right? …Will a dangerous macho place like that even be on the map?”

“You can’t hide something that size. Trying to hide it when everyone can see it will only worry people more. They won’t release a detailed layout of the interior of course.”

That was when they heard a strange “thunk!!”

A thumb-sized hole had appeared in the metal sign.

Hamazura recognized the distinctive noise of an electric motor instead of a gasoline engine. They were being targeted by one of those small eight-wheeled things with two machineguns.

(An anti-air drone! Is this Black_Oneday again!?)

“What now, Hamazura?”

“Kh. There are still a bunch of innocent workers here. We can’t get them caught up in this!!”

Just because someone didn’t take his side didn’t make them evil.

That would be a messed-up basis to screw up someone else’s life!

Hamazura shouted so the workers could hear him over the gunfire.

“Get down!! Behind that loader! Not even machinegun fire can pierce that huge snow-removal bucket, so it’ll work as a shield!!”

A middle-aged man in an airport security uniform only stared in shock without moving, so Hamazura shoved him behind a cargo container to just barely protect him from the path of gunfire.

While he was at it, he borrowed the automatic 9mm handgun from the man’s holster and returned fire. That drone would be made of alloy and plastic. An ordinary firefight couldn’t defeat it, but he could destroy its important camera lenses. If it couldn’t aim accurately, he wouldn’t need to fear its machineguns.

He responded with unbelievable accuracy.

(I’m still alive… What was that about my senses sharpening the closer I approach death? Risk isn’t something you can see, though!!)

You didn’t have to be a force of good or justice to save people.

If a villain moved their body, they could shield someone from a bullet. Saving people was no more than a physical action, the psychological conditions and questions of good or evil didn’t play a role.

So…

“I’m fine being a villain,” growled Hamazura, like he was speaking a curse. “There’s no rule saying only good people can save people. Goodness and justice may have abandoned me, but that doesn’t mean I have to stand back and let everyone else go first.”

This was an alternate approach Coronzon hadn’t considered.

If she had followed this path and saved a great many people with her power, perhaps she wouldn’t have been known as a great demon.

…So why hadn’t she considered it?

Coronzon was smart. Far smarter than a delinquent like Hamazura. It wouldn’t surprise him if she had already thought up anything he could come up with. So why had this one thing slipped her mind?

Some preconception must have gotten in the way, but where had it come from?

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet blinked.

“Did you just awaken to a different kind of justice from Kamijou Touma?”

“Are you crazy? I’m fighting with a gun I stole from ordinary airport security. He’s a normal worker. He could be fired from his job for losing it.”

Hamazura Shiage was not Kamijou Touma.

He would never take the same path of justice as him.

Part 5

Magicians could hack?

So claimed Leivinia Birdway, but it felt wrong from Kamijou’s science side viewpoint. Watermelon and curry were both tasty, but you wouldn’t want to pour curry over your watermelon. Could you really pull off a combination like that?

“For one, the Dawn-Colored Sunlight doesn’t wholly reject science.”

“?”

“But that’s not important.”

Instead of joining the Anglicans at the Hotel Town, Kamijou’s group was staying in a maintenance area further north. They had wanted somewhere safe to speak.

“Also…even if it didn’t last long, Anna Sprengel did start up R&C Occultics online. Shouldn’t you be more open minded after that? But you’re not… That line between magic and science a certain idiot embedded in the world sure is a pesky thing.”

Birdway sighed in an exasperated way.

And then…

“I shall remove your collar. Listen, isn’t there a more familiar example?”

“Hm??? Like what?”

“Grimoires. The original ones.”

The pointy-haired boy gasped.

Grimoires.

That was a familiar and yet mysterious term for him.

“Most grimoires are encrypted so you won’t receive much data if you read them as is. That is partially meant to protect the reader from an original’s toxin…but more than that it’s a security measure to keep their knowledge from the unauthorized,” said Birdway.

Encrypted, data, and security?

“But there are third parties who decrypt grimoires against the author’s wishes and steal the knowledge stored within. You are quite familiar with one, aren’t you? The biggest example would be Grimoire Library Index Librorum Prohibitorum. She has gathered at least 103,001 grimoires, after all. That is on another level entirely. And she uses all of that knowledge as countermeasures against criminal magicians, so you could call her the world’s greatest white-hat hacker.”

…Was she saying the magic side had always had the concept of breaking someone else’s code to steal their data? And it had been there for millennia?

“The thing is, magic side codes are whimsical. With alchemy symbols and coded images, the exact same mark can have a different meaning for each person who made it. You have to read between the lines and guess what the creator was thinking.” Lessar let out a cruel “nee hee hee” of laughter. “If you want another example, there’s the Egyptian pyramids and the ancient ruins of Central America. I mean the grave robbers, of course. They break through the security to steal the treasures away from their rightful owners.”

“You sound like you know a lot about that.”

“Because I’ve done it before. Who did you think dug up Curtana Original and transported it to London, leading to that mess that shook the entire UK to its core?”

Lessar brought up yet another dangerous topic.

If she knew how dangerous it was, Kamijou wished she was also smart enough to not do it in the first place.

“In a way, that girl right there is another simple example.”

“Hm? Me?”

Birdway was (rudely) pointing at Dion Fortune.

“Fortune specializes in a logic that mixes ancient magic with the psychology that was new at the time. Her texts include several methods of using the psychological world to reveal people’s secrets. Without the victim noticing, of course. If she can really do that, that’s a form of hacking beyond anything a computer can manage.”

“What do you mean ‘if’ I can do it!? Do I need to demonstrate it on you?” belligerently shouted Fortune, requiring Kamijou to calm her down.

There was no doubting it now.

Even if they didn’t use terms like “hacking” or “cyber attack”, the magic side had similar concepts. And had for a long time.

Maybe the only difference was whether it referred to physically navigating a labyrinth, breaking a grimoire’s textual and numerical code…or accessing electronic data.

Part 6

Hamazura thought they had walked a good distance from the antenna tower.

But could you really call this a walkable distance?

“Kh.”

“Uh, oh. The Anglicans are here.”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet was right.

Hamazura hid behind a nearby metal drum while observing the distant group.

They were on a flat asphalt surface with nowhere to hide. A group of men and women in street clothing were wandering around defenselessly.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet, whose metal coat meant crouching didn’t do much to hide her, didn’t seem too worried.

“What are they doing in this dreary place?”

“Waiting for us, probably.”

Those remnants of justice were now pawns of the Black_Oneday user.

A familiar face was completely surrounded at the very center of that group.

Takitsubo Rikou.

“Kh.”

…Charging in blindly wouldn’t save his girlfriend. There were swords and spears all around her.

Besides, where were they again?

A drone airbase.

Hamazura used a cheap pair of binoculars to get a look even further away.

“It does look completely different than what I expected. I was expecting a tougher version of a normal airport, with runways, a control tower, and a maintenance hangar.”

To start with, there were no runways.

Only a few 100m cannon-like objects jutting out horizontally. Those were probably launchers…but were they electromagnetic mass drivers, or did they explosively launch the drones?

Large cloths a lot like yacht sails were raised all over the base…but were those meant to catch the drones to retrieve them? The design philosophy was a lot like a bug-catching net. Drones didn’t have any of the safety standards meant to keep a pilot alive, so their operation could be a lot sloppier.

Hamazura was afraid to approach.

He spoke up while observing through the binoculars.

“I can’t see the entire security system from here. But it’s an airbase. I don’t like the idea of walking straight in where it’s open. We might get a warm welcome from automated machineguns or self-destructing drones.”

“?” Blodeuwedd the Bouquet tilted her head.

But not because she didn’t understand what he meant.

“Then how did the villain get inside the base?”

“The mobility device is there.”

It was that one-person vehicle that looked like three small wheels attached to a bathtub-sized box. It had been abandoned quite nearby. That suggested it hadn’t been a decoy and the villain really had used it to escape the Hotel Town.

There was a red flammability warning sign in the same place.

Which told Hamazura what the manhole there was.

“They used Black_Oneday, didn’t they?”

“What do you mean, Hamazura?”

“This is a fuel transport pipe. It’s thick enough that someone could walk through it if they crouched. If they used their hacking tool to remove all the jet fuel first, they would have a direct underground route into the drone airbase.”

“Ugh… They’d really go that far?”

“There aren’t any security cameras or human sensors in the pipe, so it seems like a good route in to me.”

Of course, Hamazura and Blodeuwedd the Bouquet couldn’t follow the villain in that way. If the villain knew what they were doing, they would only need to fill the pipe with jet fuel again to drown the two of them.

They needed some other way into the drone airbase.

And without warning, they heard a deafening distorted noise.

“Hey.”

Hamazura’s heart hurt.

This was District 23 full of runways and launch pads. The disaster response speakers there were designed to be heard over all sorts of loud noises.

“The program-controlled rapid-fire guns can obliterate you there,” said the new Board Chairman. “The 127mm ones can fire more than 120 rounds a minute. The Transcendent might survive, but you will die before you make it three steps.”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet pouted her lips right next to him.

“Is that even true? The Anglicans are wandering around the danger zone just fine.”

“Then they must have been added to the white list. If you aren’t and you enter that zone, the response will be instantaneous. So if you are going to do this, think it through first.”

That wasn’t what Hamazura was worried about. Which was only natural when he was speaking to someone far more dangerous than those 127mm rapid-fire guns.

“That drone airbase is one of your city’s prized possessions, right? I thought you’d be trying to stop me from getting in.”

“I don’t need any military weapons. It’s all overkill. Why does a city need enough power to destroy humanity several times over? I’m really hoping you give me an excuse to scrap it all.”

…If that was true, then was Academy City actually changing for the better?

This was convenient for Hamazura at least.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet clearly wanted to say something, but he held out a hand to stop her.

“Do you know anything about this, Mr. Great Board Chairman? You’ve got a better view of it all than some Level 0 crawling down on the ground.”

“About what?”

“The system.”

At first, that term was so simple it seemed detached from the reality before him.

But it wasn’t.

“I can’t see it. I’m not even sure that’s the right word. But Coronzon said she had been given a ‘function’ and the world wouldn’t work without it. The way she talked about it like drawing the short end of the stick, hers can’t be the only one. It sounded like there are several ‘functions’ that support the world. …But what is all that? What pushed Coronzon to the point she resorted to destroying the world? There has to be something that pushed her in that direction, but what is it really?”

There had to be a cause for the effect he had seen.

You could even say Coronzon had proven its existence with her death.

There was a system that had driven wicked Coronzon to her doom.

“You’re wasting your time.”

The Board Chairman’s response was immediate and a rejection.

It was almost painful how much Hamazura had expected this. And it was the perfect 100% correct answer for the leader of the science side where the occult and the mystical had no place.

“You’re talking about a conspiracy theory. There is no grand system running the world. Functions? Illusions? Miracles? Misfortune? You can’t just flip a giant switch to change those things. This world is run by a collection of billions of individual thoughts. Like a beanbag. When you look up at it all, it can look like it all forms giant gears, but there isn’t actually some strange system making all the decisions.”

“A perfect model answer.”

It’s all humanity’s fault. It’s all your friends’ fault. It’s all your fault.

Common sense said it wasn’t possible.

And as long as their thoughts were bound by what was realistic, no one would dig any deeper.

“Any misfortune and disaster in the world is brought about by people. Power turns people into monsters. That’s why I’m serving as Board Chairman to make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else.”

But then they wouldn’t reach the truth of the system.

Which was awfully convenient for the mysterious system running every last part of the world.

Hamazura was a Level 0 at the bottom of the hierarchy. He didn’t think he was smarter than the #1 Level 5. There was no way Accelerator couldn’t understand any idea he had.

Unless…were smarter people more easily affected and influenced by the unseen system?

If so, he could redefine his existence as a Level 0 as not so useless after all.

Hamazura suddenly wanted to talk with Kamijou Touma. That Level 0 had gone on ahead of him. Even though Hamazura knew he was the very one who had called Coronzon a great demon and killed her.

That boy had faced Coronzon and seen something inside her.

A pressure with no outlet burst inside Hamazura like a piece of unexploded ordnance.

“Then are you saying that collection of individuals just happened to coincidentally kill Coronzon? Yeah, right!! I won’t place the blame on all of them. I bet most people out there have never even heard of Coronzon! They wouldn’t create that kind of concrete malice. So! There must be a greater system out there that wanted to kill Coronzon and did so!! This isn’t a fantasy or figure of speech!! It’s real and it’s out there!!!”

Hamazura and Accelerator had reached an impasse.

The #1 had the scent of evil on him, but he was clearly different from Hamazura and Coronzon.

He had the confidence of the privileged.

“I’ll reveal it,” quietly said Hamazura.

He spoke in a low growl, like a wounded animal.

What could he do for Coronzon after carelessly surviving? That vague idea suddenly came into sharp focus.

“That’s it. I’ve made my own decision… There is a great system that decided Coronzon was a great demon of absolute evil and finally sent her to her death. I don’t care how cleverly it’s hidden itself – I will reveal it for all to see!!”

That was the end. With a click, the disaster response speakers went silent.

…

“Huh? You’re moving, Hamazura?”

“What else can I do?”

The great Board Chairman at the top of the city knew where he was. Hamazura had no idea how much that boy knew. He wanted to believe he wasn’t that foolish, but he couldn’t get careless. If the Board Chairman was still being buddy-buddy with the Anglicans, all that information would be passed right on to them.

Staying here was too dangerous.

He had to find another route to get close to the drone airbase.

Part 7

Hamazura and Blodeuwedd the Bouquet made sure to give the drone airbase a wide berth.

So they took a circle with the base as the center point.

The Black_Oneday user had to be hiding in the drone airbase waiting for their next chance to act. Whatever their ultimate objective was, it wouldn’t be something anyone else would enjoy.

Hamazura and Blodeuwedd the Bouquet knew that, but they were hesitant to act right away because they didn’t want a repeat of the Hotel Town.

The Anglicans wandering around the danger area were a nuisance. If they were simply ignorant, reconciliation and negotiation may have been an option, but not so if they were all traitors. Hamazura had to assume they were his enemy.

“Then what exactly are you going to do?”

“Aneri,” bluntly said Hamazura. “First, check to see if the Board Chairman was telling the truth about the rapid-fire guns. After that, give me a list of any other defense weapons you expect around the airbase.”

“You’re a real power user, huh?☆”

Was that even a compliment? He was really just getting the AI to think for him.

Less than ten seconds later, the phone’s cracked screen displayed the answer he was dreading.

“So not even Aneri can find a convenient loophole.”

“But you can’t just break in by brute force, right? What’s the last defense weapon you want to run across?”

“Not those rapid-fire guns. It’s this: the Boom Wall.”

That anti-air weapon used a large amount of explosives all at once to send an amplified shockwave wall from the giant trumpet-shaped barrel. It didn’t require any detailed guidance calculations because the thick wall could be sent over an area several kilometers across. It was meant as a low budget way to shoot down a saturation attack or swarm without missing anything.

“Um, let me get this straight.” Blodeuwedd the Bouquet held a finger to her narrow chin and began counting on her fingers. “If we approach the base, we get hit by those hundred-twenty-something millimeter rapid-fire guns. But if we approach in an airplane or helicopter, we’ll be shot down by dense anti-air fire. And all the underground loopholes like the fuel pipe have been blocked. …Then how do we get in?”

“…”

Not even Aneri had provided an answer to that. Maybe there wasn’t a correct solution here.

Hamazura no longer placed his hopes in the righteousness of justice. He would force his way through with cheap, underhanded tactics, even if it that counted as evil.

After a moment of silence, he answered.

“No matter how brutal it is, the Boom Wall is an anti-air weapon. That means it isn’t designed to target the ground. If we skim around five meters above the surface, the barrel shouldn’t be able to aim at a low enough angle.”

“Even if you drive full speed in a car, I think like you’ll still get shot up by those rapid-fire guns.”

“What if we were moving faster? Like Mach 10 or higher?”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet blinked.

This was unusual. He had surprised that condescending Transcendent.

“What I mean, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet, is that. Why not use that?”

He pointed to the side.

They had already brought it up in conversation several times.

The Morning Star above ground mass driver.

Instead of using an underground silo, this one looked just like a cannon the size of a broadcast tower.

It wasn’t like a chemical rocket that flew to space using fuel and an oxidant. Electromagnetic induction was used to launch a projectile outside the atmosphere.

“Are you serious?”

Even Blodeuwedd the Bouquet was dumbfounded by this one.

“That can slip past both the surface and anti-air weapons, right? Aneri, can you hack it?”

“Wait, wait, wait, wait! That’s meant to launch things into space. Can it even be used along a line only 5m from the ground? Screw it up and we’ll crash into the ground!!”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“…”

“We’re not talking about a plane or rocket here. A mass driver is basically a giant railgun, so it apparently has a lot of freedom of movement. So it’s no different from a gun. …We can use the ricochet. If we intentionally hit the ground at a shallow angle, we should be able to fly just off the ground.”

“……………………………………………………………………………”

It was like skipping a rock on the water’s surface.

And the drone airbase had equipment resembling giant yacht sails. They were meant to catch flying drones.

Hamazura would just have to hit one of those in something like a billiards shot.

“Umm, I have one last question.”

“Yes? Hurry it up.”

“How many Machs is escape velocity? Even at a shallow angle, we’ll be hitting the ground at extreme speed, right? I don’t care how tough the mass driver’s payload fairing is – won’t we be smashed to bits by the impact!?”

Hamazura couldn’t answer right away.

He asked a serious question.

“Hey, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet. …You survived that exoatmospheric shuttle’s gigantic engine blast, right?”

“…Wait.”

“Can I get you to do that one last time?”

“I am supposed to be the weak but clever summoner! Not the tough and heavy tank!!”

She could complain, but this really did seem to be their only option.

Using that, he was pretty sure they could survive the hit with the ground.

It was fortunate there weren’t any workers or a security team at the drone airbase. He didn’t know how big a crater the ricochet would create, but he at least didn’t need to worry about hurting any living humans in the process.

“Aneri, let’s get started. Hack the Morning Star mass driver and give me control! Please!!”

Part 8

Leivinia Birdway looked up at a dull tremor in the distance.

“…Something just happened.”

“Enough self-absorption. We need to come up with an actual plan.”

Lessar’s comment shattered the mood so much it made Kamijou flustered.

Dion Fortune walked over to look at the map Lessar had unfolded.

“Decided on our next objective?” asked Kamijou.

Birdway pouted her lips and pointed at a point on the map. Maybe she hadn’t been too fond of the legendary Japanese portable food: cup noodles. If that damn rich British girl had a problem with it, she should have just poured in fancy tea instead of hot water and waited three minutes for the flavor to change.

“Here.”

She indicated a special airbase used for Academy City’s unmanned anti-air weaponry like the Six Wings attack helicopter.

That was one of the last facilities they wanted the Black_Oneday user to take over.

Kamijou frowned.

“Yeah, that would be dangerous…but what makes you so sure it’s here specifically?”

“Did the villain give themselves away somehow?” asked Dion Fortune next to Kamijou.

Lessar frowned.

“We can follow the actions of the villain…or really the people they’re manipulating.”

“Hm? Why would you do that, Lessar?”

“You know how delinquents who drive modified cars will intercept police radio and know where all the speed cameras are locate? This is the magic version of that.”

After explaining that, Lessar (who was really enjoying the junk food), pointed at a point on the map.

“The Anglicans are always trying to crack down on us ‘bad’ magicians, so we know exactly how they do things.”

“!?”

So Kanzaki, Stiyl, and the others?

“It would be one thing if they were acting alone, but when working as a group, they tend to use voice communication spiritual items. Even when speaking with one of their own people less than 2 meters away. We just have to track the faint magic power this uses.”

“That’s true enough… Academy City is a big place, but not many people here use magic. London or Rome would be one thing, but we can detect even faint magic over a distance in this city of science,” added Dion Fortune.

…It hadn’t seemed so easy during the Coronzon battle yesterday. Maybe it helped that these shady magicians had gathered a lot of data on the Anglicans. Just like you would have a hard time searching for an unfamiliar stray cat, but could find your own cat right away.

Lessar wagged her index finger.

“Looks like the area around the drone base is an off-limits zone. There are cameras and sensors everywhere and entering it without permission will get you filled with holes by the defense program. Yet the Anglicans are having a picnic there without getting shot. Unnatural, right?”

“The Black_Oneday user is controlling them using money, faith, brainwashing, or whatever else, so the Anglicans are useful pawns. The Black_Oneday user must not want to lose them so easily. We need to assume the drone airbase and its defense program have been taken over. The Anglicans are only safe because they’ve been added to the white list.” Birdway seemed curious about the earlier tremor, but her tone remained light. “If the Anglicans are being used to pursue and kill Hamazura Shiage, then either he’s hiding somewhere around here, or he will be here soon. Both the villain and Hamazura are here. If we want to end this, we need to visit that drone airbase.”

(Hm. I still don’t know how the Anglicans are tracking Hamazura. Could they be getting information out of someone from the science side they captured?)

Kamijou observed Birdway, but it didn’t seem like that possibility had occurred to her.

Really, that just made her seem more like an ordinary person.

“…We’ll be shot if we’re detected, right?”

“Of course.”

“Then we need a plan! That smug grin isn’t going to stop bullets!! These stupid magicians are so focused on attacking they’re not even thinking about defense. We’ll be riddled with bullets before I even have a chance to think!”

Part 9

That wasn’t actually a concern.

Because the mass driver attack stabbed right into the center of the drone airbase.

More specifically, it was caught by one of the giant “sails” meant to catch drones.

A piece of metal the size of a van shallowly struck the ground very close by at a tremendous speed of more than 12km/s, ricocheted, and pierced into the base. It slipped just below the anti-air defenses at extreme speed.

“Ugh, cough.”

Something emerged from the giant bullet-like vehicle made of thick heat-resistant and shock-resistant material.

That something was a thick metal coat.

There was no attack from the rapid-fire guns or the Boom Wall.

They weren’t designed to fire into the base…but that wasn’t the main reason.

“Wow…I think we destroyed like half the base.”

“Of course we did.” Hamazura crawled out from within the metal coat. “Even if it was a shallow angle, we still hit the ground right in front of the base to ricochet. At escape velocity. A normal bullet makes sparks when it hits a concrete wall, right? When a mass this large contacts the ground at that speed, it will send an explosive blast and a shockwave ahead with the force of an avalanche. And it fans out.”

“You knew this would happen? But if the base is half destroyed, you couldn’t know if the yacht sail thing’s support would break and not be there to catch us!”

“But we made it. We won the gamble, so why waste time complaining?”

“Y-you idiot, you really are on fire today. …And do you think this also killed the villain?”

“This is military base, remember? The important central stuff will be deep underground. Blowing away the stuff visible on the surface won’t damage the heart of the base.”

Even so, preventing all the unmanned weapons from taking off or landing meant a lot.

Hamazura looked out past the wreckage-strewn base.

“So what are those Anglicans doing?”

“They avoided it. They were apparently scattered along the perimeter on the other side, so the shockwave that blew away this half of the base wouldn’t have hit them.”

…So even after all this, they might attack. Still, that was better than if he had hurt his girlfriend Takitsubo.

“Aneri search for the entrance to the underground part of the base and force open the electronic lock!”

They were in.

Yes, Hamazura Shiage and Blodeuwedd the Bouquet had made it inside the drone base.

Now they only had to determine which room of this drone-development air base the Black_Oneday user was hiding in.

“I doubt anyone is placing any trust in security cameras when both sides have hacking tools.”

Aneri gave two buzzes of protest. Apparently to say it was not primarily meant for hacking.

“Hey, hey. How about you rely on the magic side for once? Do I need to turn into the pain-in-the-ass kind of girlfriend who’s jealous of the porn on your phone? I might just know how to find which room it is.”

“How?”

“Because I’m the Transcendent who loves the hated☆ …The villain might be someone who looks like they wouldn’t hurt a fly, but that doesn’t mean they actually wouldn’t kill a fly or a moth if it flew in front of them, right? And those things can easily multiply inside an unmanned base.”

“…”

His phone buzzed again. That was a positive signal from Aneri. Based on its hacking of the base’s local network, the chemical weapon sensors in one section had picked up faint signs of insecticide components. That kind of chemical wouldn’t be needed in a base without any people around.

“That settles it. They’re in…the underground command center? That’s the first place I should have guessed. Argh, why did I have to overcomplicate it!?”

“It’s easy to claim you had it figured out after you’ve been spoiled. Did you think you were a genius, or something?”

They used Aneri’s support to travel through the base without getting caught.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet had said the base was unmanned…and apparently they really had reduced the number of human workers to the very limit because they didn’t run into anyone on the way. But since the place had a command center deep underground, the control couldn’t be completely automatic, could it?

“Is that it, Aneri?” asked Hamazura, facing a tungsten steel door as thick as a bank vault door. He guessed the underground command center was built as sturdily as a nuclear shelter.

But this was a problem.

He was usually the criminal trying to run and hide.

He didn’t know the proper way to break in like this.

“This is the very center of the base, right? This door has to be crazy solid, so how do we unlock it? How are we supposed to get insi-”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet destroyed the door with a single punch from her metal coat’s giant sleeve. It scared Hamazura that it didn’t even surprise him. He was getting too accustomed to her bizarre power.

The room beyond was larger than the average indoor pool.

But it didn’t feel spacious. Thanks to all the computers crammed inside. But there was more than just LCD monitors in there. There were also devices that displayed a wide variety of data on giant pieces of clear glass like what you would see inside a submarine in a movie. Hamazura didn’t know what a lot of the equipment was even called.

But he didn’t have time to pay much attention to all that.

He thought his heart would stop.

The first thing Hamazura saw were the Anglicans. They were armed with dangerous bladed and blunt weapons and had the same unquestioning looks in their eyes.

And he saw someone else surrounded by them and unmoving: Takitsubo Rikou.

“H-Hamazu- Hama-”

“!!”

He wanted to call her name, but he knew that would be the most dangerous thing he could do. No good came of letting them know the value of their hostage.

He had to stay on the path of evil.

He had already decided he could only protect his girlfriend by placing her second.

Shaking off that urge was so hard he thought he would cough up blood…but he managed to face the other oddity here.

“Hold on. What are you doing here?”

He faced the mastermind behind it all.

She was a girl with chestnut hair. And he had heard her voice before.

“N-no… Help.”

She was a small girl of around 13. He recognized the fluffy adult coat that came down to her ankles and hid her hands in the sleeves.

“Go.”

“Hurry.”

He didn’t want to believe it.

But his own memory didn’t lie.

“The girl I saved…from the Dobermanns…way back at the start?”

Come to think of it, he had never solved the initial mystery.

The Anglicans had made that cell by modifying a die-like air cargo container. The door had been locked up tight – the metal shutter had used some kind of special magical lock – so why had it suddenly opened even though he and Aneri hadn’t done a thing?

Had he been in the palm of her hand since then?

“That’s right, Hamazura. I saved you.”

The girl smiled a little while holding a plush bear in her arm.

Aneri gave two buzzes of warning.

…It wasn’t a phone or a computer. Was that the device used to give instructions to Black_Oneday? The plush bear had a trackball, keyboard, and other devices installed on and in it.

“But…why? Why did you have to take it so far? I mean, you were in a position to brainwash the Anglicans who were after you, right!? Every last one of them!! So you didn’t even need to free me from my cell to confuse them!”

“?”

In response, the girl tilted her head in utter confusion.

He also heard a sigh of exasperation from Blodeuwedd the Bouquet.

“Yeah, uh, Hamazura, I don’t think that’s what it was.”

“What?”

“That villain simply let you escape because she wanted to let you escape. I’m sure of it. It was a whim with no connection to any master plan related to confusing the Anglicans or starting a global war using Black_Oneday.”

“Wait, but…the Black_Oneday user really tried to kill me! I mean, what about at the Hotel Town? She fired on me with that eight-wheeled anti-air drone and she tried to blow me away with vaporized jet fuel…”

“But you didn’t actually die. You’re a Level 0, yet you survived all those flashy attacks. Seems unnatural, doesn’t it?”

It couldn’t be…

“Are you saying the Black_Oneday user intentionally adjusted the difficulty so I could get through it? Like making sure someone doesn’t die when playing a game!?”

She had wanted to free Hamazura separate from whatever else she was doing.

…That was all it was? Really???

But if she wanted to save Hamazura, why had she gotten Takitsubo involved?

The girl pulled out a headband and used it to keep her bangs out of her eyes.

“What? Were you trying to save that track suit girl?”

“…Yeah.”

“Okay. If that’s what you want, I’ll free her.”

Several thudding sounds overlapped each other. They were the sounds of bodies hitting the floor. Kanzaki Kaori, Stiyl Magnus, and the rest of the Anglican magicians collapsed like a switch had been thrown. The only one left standing was Takitsubo Rikou.

Was that all it took?

Saying that had really been enough to save her?

“Hold on…what’s going on here?” muttered Hamazura in a daze.

He was glad Takitsubo was safe, but he had trouble believing it was true. He was worried something even worse awaited him.

Besides, how had it even turned out like this?

Even if this girl really was behind everything, today was the first time he had met her. She shouldn’t have any obligation to help him out.

“Because our circumstances are similar. So I don’t get anything out of it. I just felt like helping you is all.”

“Eh?”

“You don’t want people calling that person a great demon, right?”

That was true.

But why was she bringing that up here?

“I am one of several anti-magic combat plans developed in parallel on former Archbishop Lola Stuart’s command. But Grimoire Library Index Librorum Prohibitorum was ultimately chosen, so I am no more than a scrapped model forgotten as a phantom project.”

The name Lola Stuart wasn’t too familiar to Hamazura, but he was pretty sure it had been one of Coronzon’s pseudonyms.

Meaning…

“I am Narthex Coded Cathedral. …I suppose you could call me one of the products raised by Coronzon.”

Part 10

Narthex Coded Cathedral.

A sister project and rival to Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

The small girl never had any intention of trapping or attacking Hamazura Shiage.

But that didn’t mean she carried no malice.

In fact, Narthex had another true target.

“Kh.”

Someone else groaned.

With the surface of the drone airbase torn to shreds, he must not have had to worry about the defense weapons.

Kamijou had entered the underground command center late, but he too had learned the villain’s identity.

“You made it, Kamijou Touma.”

The girl’s voice had seemed unfocused before, but now it carried a definite will and emotion.

The emotions of anger and hatred.

“My mother’s killer.”

She was an expert at building and cracking codes. She was a pro at reading the idiosyncrasies in people’s techniques and their psychologies.

Numbers, writing, magic circles, artwork, music – it could be anything.

“If I had arrived in time last night…I would have stopped you.”

Grimoire Library Index Librorum Prohibitorum used her perfect memory to contain innumerable grimoires in her brain to manage them there. You could say she had mastered the art of literary memorization, but this special girl took a completely different approach for plotting the elimination of wicked magicians.

“So is she like a stealth fighter that’s rival was officially adopted instead?”

“I doubt it even had to do with her skill level. She had to be kept a secret because she violates the treaty between magic and science. She grew too much, so her specs are not inferior.”

Lessar and Birdway gave their cynical thoughts.

“I notice Index’s name is Latin, but Narthex’s is English… Dammit, Coronzon. Did you intentionally throw them into different environments so they could grow in different ways?”

“Why do I get the feeling there are plenty more of these girls lurking in the shadows of the world. Maybe with a French name or a German name?”

As if in response…

Narthex threw open the front of her thick coat as if undoing a seal.

Her clothing was transparent. The overall silhouette resembled a nun’s habit, but it was made of pure gold and woven into a fine net, allowing her lace-white skin to show through. Below that, she wore something like a bikini. Although there may have been other way of interpreting it.

It was far too vulgar and degrading to call her a nun.

But that wasn’t what made Birdway frown. She was focused on the coat’s lining. A sticky light resembling glow-in-the-dark paint wavered irregularly there.

“A second brain, huh? I have heard the human brain would be as large as a newspaper page if you flattened out all the wrinkles. Hey, is that true, Kamijou Touma of the city of science?”

But it was Kamijou who was most shocked by this.

That was fundamentally different from Index’s Walking Church.

What even was that coat really? It wasn’t actually that, was it!?

“If you’re externally boosting your specs like that, then your supposed encryption expertise is no bluff. …But this means your ego and soul were fundamentally distorted, turning you into a tool and a device. Did you not hate the great demon for doing that to you?”

“You just referred to my mother as a great demon, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, she’s pretty twisted. But who knows what she’s hiding,” said Lessar, sounding exasperated.

Yes.

This was familiar to Kamijou too.

This combination of endlessly innocent yet somehow twisted.

…The collar.

Hadn’t Index had her memories and thoughts externally restricted to control her? This girl had been manufactured by the same person. Narthex Coded Cathedral was the result of a parallel project, so she could always have a similar safety device.

And based on the way Narthex was acting, her safety device may still have been functioning even after Coronzon’s death. How sad if true.

Lessar’s interest was directed in a less appropriate direction.

“Does that outfit incorporate the symbols of a trance priestess? Seems like the polar opposite of a Christian nun’s pursuit of asceticism. Oh, but I guess she might not be limited to Christianity. I mean, she’s a magician created from the ground up by Great Demon Coronzon. That opens up everything from Norse mythology in the west to Indian mythology in the east. Really, any kind of religious ritual that invites people to the supernatural world, puts them in a trance so they can hear the voice of god, and accepts the power of sexuality.”

Something audibly sliced through the air.

Lessar didn’t even blink. But there was a slight cut on her cheek now.

Apparently she wasn’t going to get away with calling Coronzon a great demon a second time.

Narthex Coded Cathedral immediately took action.

Calmly.

(Her mother, hm?)

What had her relationship with Lola Stuart – with Coronzon – really been? Kamijou’s imagination couldn’t keep up, but he got the feeling that relationship had been closer than Coronzon’s with Index.

Or.

Had that different relationship been one of the changes included in the parallel projects, along with the naming rule?

Narthex had said her project was run at the same time as Index’s. So were they around the same age?

…Wait, how old was Index exactly?

If they had been customized with all of Coronzon’s power, it was possible those girls’ bodies were far from ordinary.

Lessar and Birdway quietly prepared for battle, but Narthex didn’t seem worried.

“What, you’re going to fight? Index’s job is to crack a grimoire’s code and record its contents in her brain, but mine is the opposite. I am an expert at applying a strange and complex encryption to exposed knowledge, sealing it away in an unreadable state. Incantations, talismans, weapons – whatever form you use to try and get around it, no magician can defeat me.”

Was that why Kanzaki, Stiyl, and the other Anglican magicians were acting so weirdly?

“Sealing away” a small portion of their thought processes would keep them from reacting to a specific situation. So even with a hint before their eyes, they couldn’t see it. They had been so busy pursuing Hamazura Shiage they were unable to notice the real villain.

But this had seemed odd even taking that into account.

They were from Necessarius, the 0th Parish of the Anglican Church. They were the best of the best in anti-magician combat, so it was unusual for them to all get brainwashed so easily. …But it made more sense if it had been done by an insider who knew all about them. Just like a hacker might not be able to hack in from outside the building, but they would have no trouble if they stuck a USB drive directly into a computer on the inside.

“You would go this far…? What were you hoping to accomplish here in Academy City by betraying an organization as big as the Anglican Church!?”

“To bring back my mother. What else?”

She made it sound so similar.

But Coronzon was already dead.

Kamijou had done it.

Wasn’t that why Narthex was driven by such fury? So…had she not noticed the contradiction in her own claims?

“What contradiction? It’s been done before. …By one Kamijou Touma who truly died and returned after a trip through hell.”

“Kh.”

“My mother can be physically revived to this world in the same way. Wait a while longer, Hamazura. This will be a blessing for you. I will make sure it happens.”

The shocked gasp did not come from Kamijou.

Did that breath contain a hint of hope? It rang with the expectation represented by the words “is that really possible?” If Coronzon could return to this world, it would turn his view of this situation around 180 degrees.

Those two really did stand in a position fundamentally different from Kamijou and the rest.

“Simple, isn’t it? What happened in hell, a different phase separate from this physical world? No matter how impregnable a maze hell may be, I can break open your skull, stick electrodes in your brain, and suck out all the memory data within to give myself a walkthrough. My mother can be brought back by human hands.”

Was the disappearance of his important document really a coincidence? Or had he been lured out here?

“I have already acquired my mother’s dead body. It is hidden somewhere in this city. I was worried because some time had passed since her death, but, well, it’s a good thing she isn’t human. …She is fundamentally a being of pure energy, so as long as I follow the appropriate steps to complete the ceremony, she can be summoned from that other phase, right?”

Birdway had a disgusted response to that.

“A demon summoning, huh? Unfortunately, there is a precedent there.”

“Yes. Magician Crowley did it back in 1909, didn’t he? And Mathers apparently did it unofficially even earlier. Plus, I have this.”

An eerie light shined from within Narthex’s fluffy coat.

From the second brain.

And next thing they knew, Narthex Coded Cathedral held something in her hand.

Birdway of all people gasped.

“Kamijou Touma. What does that look like to you?”

“Huh? I’m not sure… It’s like an apple made of red crystal maybe? Looks like there’s a liquid inside it.”

“Lessar.”

“Umm, it looks like fish cooked on a skewer to me. Probably from Celtic mythology.”

…What?

People could have slightly different interpretations of what they were seeing, but confusing a translucent red apple for a fish on a skewer was a little much. This wasn’t a Rorschach test.

“To me it looks like a small bottle of clear crystal. Maybe the Norse spring of wisdom, or something alchemical? It might be a liquid elixir.”

Wait. Wait, wait.

Didn’t that mean no two of them were seeing the same thing!?

“What you’re seeing is probably the fruit that grew on the Tree of Knowledge. Apples are a motif used in several mythologies, but it must be that if it’s linked with knowledge. Now, I don’t know what it looks like to its user Narthex…but is she using that in a ceremony?”

For once, Birdway clenched her teeth as she spoke.

Lessar provided the verbal finishing blow.

“She means that’s a collection of knowledge before it’s turned into a grimoire. And this would make a dangerous original-class one, so don’t let your guard down, Kamijou-san!!”

Part 11

Kamijou didn’t need to be told that.

But Narthex’s specialty wasn’t grimoires. That was Index’s territory. Since they were rival projects run in parallel, Lola Stuart – that is, Great Demon Coronzon – must have designed her for a different specialty.

Also, Narthex Coded Cathedral didn’t fight with just the magic side.

“This room could use more ventilation. And so could you!!”

The air in the room groaned. District 23 specialized in high-tech aerospace technology, so the Black_Oneday hacking tool could provide any number of weapons here.

Narthex pet the head of the plush bear in her small hand.

Boom!!!

Immediately, the underground command center’s wall was torn down from the outside. The place had to be sturdier than a nuclear shelter, but she didn’t hesitate at all!?

Birdway shouted through clenched teeth.

“That must have been a drone. She’ll have plenty of bunker killer missiles based on the marine rockets used to dig into the ocean floor and retrieve samples. Hey, Kamijou Touma. Leave the command center. Otherwise you’ll be shredded to mincemeat before you can even try to fight her directly!!”

Narthex was still standing there.

She touched the plush bear to give her next command. Again with no hesitation.

She didn’t seem to see any value in the underground command center that acted as the heart of the base.

“Wh-what about Hamazura and the others!?”

“You don’t have time to worry about them! Move out in the open and you’ll be sprayed with bullets!!”

If Narthex was being rational, she wouldn’t order an attack that would hit Hamazura. …But how much could he trust the thoughts of a Coronzon worshiper?

Kamijou’s group didn’t have time to work out where would be safe.

More and more of the walls and ceiling were torn down. They would be buried alive if they stayed here, so they had to keep running.

“What is this place?”

They found themselves in a wide-open space. It wasn’t well lit, but the size was the main reason Kamijou couldn’t see to the other side.

Lessar sounded annoyed.

“Is this where Academy City’s fighters and attack helicopters are managed?”

While Kamijou was from Academy City, that didn’t mean he knew all about the interior of the city’s military facilities. Especially with a drone airbase.

And Lessar had just said something he couldn’t ignore.

“Wait… If this is where the drones are kept, does that mean they could come here!?”

“It would seem you all want to die.”

They heard a voice from the entrance. It was Narthex Coded Cathedral.

Heavy metallic noises came from a different direction.

A Six Wings attack helicopter emerged from the shadows.

This was an underground facility. As large as the room was, it wasn’t tall enough for an aircraft to fly around.

But it wasn’t flying.

The six wings it was named for were forcibly moving to let it crawl. Its guns and autocannons were crushed below its own weight.

“Watch out for the floor. It seems to be reinforced with steel beams, but I can see something through the gaps.”

“Is this a multilevel hangar? That means we could break through if we overdo it. This isn’t getting any easier.”

Birdway clicked her tongue.

Narthex touched the plush bear…and operated the trackball installed within it.

She didn’t hesitate to speak.

“Do it.”

The 30ton mass charged forward.

That was deadly enough on its own given a large semi-truck or tanker truck weighed 10 tons, but it was too forceful. It was effectively robbing itself of its guns and missiles this way.

No.

That was an unmanned attack helicopter, so it would have no problem with crushing its own missiles or shells and exploding from within. Because the shockwave and shrapnel would shred Kamijou.

“Weakling,” spat Birdway.

“Hee hee. Once I win, make sure to use my name when you compliment me, you dumb-as-shit little girl.”

Lessar stepped forward and threw something. Even though Kamijou could have sworn she had been empty-handed a moment before.

A flat piece of stone even more precise than a ruler drew out an erratic course like a boomerang.

“Thou art valiant yet no match for the thunder god, but I shall even make use of thy defeat. Whetstone of Hrungnir, shatter and pierce!!”

Stone scattershot flew out 360 degrees around the point it hit.

The crawling Six Wings tilted unnaturally.

Lessar appeared to have thrown a projectile at the arm’s joint to prevent anything from detonating.

But even broken and off balance, the Six Wings did not stop. It was now in a position resembling a formal bow…which meant its main rotor was tilted diagonally toward them as it made its next move.

“Uh, oh,” groaned Kamijou.

The main rotor rotated with great force. Like a giant blender blade intent on slicing through everything in the world. It stirred up the air into a gale as the Six Wings, missing a few of its arms, scraped its fuselage against the floor in its forced approach.

“Run, run, run! Get behind a pillar or something!!”

“That pillar’s too skinny. That thing can slice right through a steel beam.”

Then did they have to destroy the Six Wings?

Despite what the term “aircraft” would suggest, attack helicopters were meant to attack tanks and armored trucks on the ground. So their engine was located at the point hardest to target from below.

And with the Six Wings approaching with its main rotor tilted toward them, that point was now right in front of them. They couldn’t stop the deadly rotating blade without destroying the engine, but a magical projectile from Lessar or Birdway would most likely cause the jet fuel to explode.

Imagine Breaker was the only card in Kamijou’s deck, so no one expected anything from him to begin with. He could only shout in a panic.

“Wh-what do we do!?”

“Eliminate the threat, obviously,” spat Birdway with a glance toward Lessar. “Hey, weakling. The cabal boss’s life is in your hands. If I die because you didn’t do your job, the Dawn-Colored Sunlight will be forced to head out on a hunting picnic, so be careful.”

“Gyehhh. This is why I didn’t want to be this selfish little girl’s bodyguard. Every part of the job is a deadly gamble!!”

Birdway already held some kind of metal wand. Kamijou hadn’t even seen her pull it out. And compressed flames hovered at the end of it.

If she carelessly launched that, it would cause everything to explode, blowing them all to smither-

“Hot and dry. That is, the fire of fire. I’ll blow you away Mathers-style, small fry!!”

There was nothing Kamijou could do. He could only watch as the orange fireball was launched.

And exploded.

But there wasn’t just one explosion. The jet fuel was dangerous enough, but the shells and missiles carried within the Six Wings detonated too.

The steel beams below their feet bent and a portion of the floor groaned. The movement of the smoke was odd. A slight breeze was blowing in from the lower level. The floor was designed for aircraft weighing dozens of tons, but this had caused it to collapse.

However…

“Magic is such a threat to science because it can brute force its way through these things.”

They were all unharmed.

Because Lessar had held out her palm and activated something.

It looked like a glowing translucent wall.

If they had a way to protect them all from a military weapon exploding at close range, they could blow away as many of those unmanned Six Wings as necessary. Magic really was a brute force power found by pursuing wisdom far enough.

But.

“Hee hee.”

The magicians surviving the scientific Six Wings had not put a dent in Narthex’s composure.

Solid snapping sounds came from her.

Did they come from the back of her neck…or from her back?

Birdway grinned.

“That would be the branches. The physical connections are used to alter her second brain’s thought circuits.”

In other words, she could switch between using magical encryption or the scientific hacking tool.

She could switch between two modes corresponding to the two worlds.

“If you would prefer to be killed by one or the other, let me know soon.”

Narthex’s bewitching smile looked out of place on her small body.

But learning this external sign gave Kamijou’s side an advantage.

She held out her empty hand – the one not holding the plush bear.

Yes. Narthex Coded Cathedral could use more than just the scientific hacking tool.

Her lips formed a smile and then whispered.

“Seal.”

Leivinia Birdway stiffened.

She suddenly came to a stop in the middle of battle.

“!?”

“What’s wrong, Birdway!? If you have a trump card, use it now!!”

Kamijou shouted wide-eyed, but the small girl’s eyes remained lowered to her hands.

Birdway, the Dawn-Colored Sunlight’s boss, was trembling.

“…I can’t.”

“What?”

“I was just using spells without even thinking about it…but now I don’t know how. No, was the neural pathway sealed, temporarily preventing me from remembering how!?”

“Wait, wait, wait. I don’t have the talent of a powerful cabal boss. You can’t take away the one or two things an average person like me can do! Then I’ll just be a normal human!”

Lessar blanched and abandoned the spell she had been frantically trying to compose.

Memories.

Was this the opposite of Index who kept having hers taken?

If the sealer could predict what card you would play before you used it, you could never use it again.

Narthex was designed for anti-magician combat. She was a different sort of wizard killer from Grimoire Library Index. She rejected the mystical side of her enemy.

Kamijou had known this wouldn’t be easy, but she was an even more dangerous foe than he had expected!

He couldn’t bear to look at Birdway and Lessar who had immediately been taken out of the fight. He frantically raised his voice.

“Wh-what do we do? If that’s magic, I can destroy it with Imagine Breaker, but do you have a weird magic circle on your body or something? What part of you am I supposed to touch to fix this!?”

“I don’t know! Just touch me all over and give me lots of head pats!!”

He had a feeling he couldn’t trust what panicked Lessar was saying. Since he couldn’t expect much from the magicians, was Imagine Breaker all he had?

Only that. …When the enemy had her pick of magic or science!

Part 12

“Nyah!?”

The underground command center’s walls and floor had collapsed.

Hamazura heard a panicked voice from nearby and looked over to see a flustered Blodeuwedd the Bouquet. It wasn’t that she had been suddenly pulled down. The emaciated girl was being crushed by her own weight.

Or more accurately, by the weight of her thick metal coat covered in copper panels that could move like an independent creature.

…Her ability to survive a hit from a 10-ton truck or launch the truck up from below apparently came from the metal coat. Was it like a powered suit? When the giant engine had blasted her with flames, had she protected her exposed face with magic or did the coat provide some kind of protective field? Whatever the case, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet herself must not have been particularly sturdy and tough.

“Th-this is bad… That Narthex girl sealed my metal coat. Will no one other than you accept me as their ally?”

She had sided with Kamijou and worked toward killing Coronzon not long ago, so maybe it was only natural Narthex resented her.

Kamijou and Narthex were fighting in a fairly distant location, but apparently they were still close enough for the effects to reach them here. With the thick walls and floor collapsed, there was no longer any division between rooms.

“So what now, Hamazura?”

“What now?”

Narthex Coded Cathedral was an unofficial Anglican nun weapon who could use magical and scientific technology with a focus on the concept of “sealing”. She was a forbidden trump card Coronzon hadn’t had a chance to play before she died. Level 0 Hamazura Shiage couldn’t think of a single way of hurting someone like that.

“No.”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet must have known what the waver in his eyes meant because she immediately rejected his thoughts.

“You see how chaotic their battle is, right? He’s wide open right now. Your vengeance probably can’t reach Kamijou Touma if you attack head on, but you might be able to stab him in the side right now. That’s what I’m talking about.”

So.

Was she asking if he could see what Narthex Coded Cathedral had done today and guess what she was likely to do in the future…and still focus on attacking Kamijou Touma instead?

“Why are you here?”

That was the fundamental question.

And not just in this moment. It was a question he had asked himself over and over: when he saw Coronzon die, when he was trapped in that box, when the cell was unlocked, and after he was freed.

“To save the world and put smiles on everyone’s faces? Or to get back at Kamijou Touma!? …You need to actually face your own goal here, Hamazura. You need to stop blaming someone or something else, lamenting that your circumstances or environment are the problem without trying to fix them, and cursing the world as a whole. Neither Kamijou Touma nor Narthex Coded Cathedral are paying any attention to you. As you can see, I can’t move with control of my metal coat sealed. So whether you win, lose, save, or destroy, you’re the one who holds the choice in your hands, Hamazura Shiage!!”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet was the Transcendent who loved the hated.

Good, evil, humanity, the world…and even her own life were secondary to that.

“None of those ridiculous conditions matter.”

So she smiled as she made a suggestion.

As a Transcendent, it was an extremely destructive suggestion.

And it was just like the one he had once given Coronzon.

“Just do whatever it is you want to do, Hamazura.”

Part 13

Kamijou clenched his teeth.

Narthex Coded Cathedral could seal any magic she predicted before it was used, so any magician would be driven into a worse and worse position as the battle continued.

(It’s technically not a negation like my Imagine Breaker. It’s probably a mind control power that precisely messes with their brain, preventing them from remembering the necessary incantation.)

If she could use that magic, did it mean she, unlike Index, could refine her life force into magic power?

…The worst part was that there was no penalty for Narthex if her prediction was wrong. It wasn’t like she could only seal away a maximum of five things at a time or that she lost some power each time she was wrong. That meant she could use it all she liked. She had no reason to hesitate. She could seal away any magician if she set up a perimeter by listing off the ten or twenty most likely candidates.

Kamijou would have to do it.

Imagine Breaker let him fight Narthex without worrying about her magic sealing!

“(Or we can use magic she doesn’t expect in the slightest for a cheap win. Either way, you move out and gather attention. Make us look like no more than useless bystanders.)”

“(Because once Narthex isn’t paying attention to us, we’re free to act again. Even a spell that wouldn’t normally hit can do the trick if we launch it from a blind spot☆)”

Just then Narthex whispered a word.

“Release.”

That word was the opposite of a seal, making it the trigger to free something.

But free what?

Kamijou didn’t even have time to wonder.

“Come forth, knowledge. You are the Original Sin for which all mankind was expelled from paradise!!”

Lessar’s body tilted unnaturally to the side. Before a surprised Kamijou could even try to support her, Birdway collapsed to the floor. She was bleeding from the nose and mouth, but she did nothing to wipe it away. She had passed out.

(What? That wasn’t poison gas. It would’ve taken me out too. But then…)

Narthex sneered over at him from her distant position.

The hand not holding the plush bear was toying with a floating apple seemingly made of red crystal. No, that was only what it looked like to Kamijou. Whatever it was, it could take many forms.

“Did you forget I am holding the fruit hanging from the branches of the Tree of Knowledge? This is the raw forbidden knowledge before it is processed into a grimoire.”

So were those two in the same state they would be if they had received the toxic knowledge of an original grimoire!? No one other than Index could defend against that. And given a professional magician’s greed for knowledge, they may have had their souls absorbed and polluted even more than a normal person.

But what if attacking the magicians had delayed her by a step, creating an opening?

“!!”

Kamijou immediately grabbed a burner from the floor. It was probably a maintenance tool for the military weapons kept here.

Instead of targeting Narthex, he went for a thick power cable running alongside a steel pillar.

What if he burned through that and dropped the sliced end to the floor?

The cut power cable scattered bluish-white sparks and he rushed rapidly along the steel reinforcement beams arranged in a lattice pattern. He ran toward little Narthex!

An unpleasant “zap!!” rang out.

But Narthex Coded Cathedral did not fall.

Just beforehand, her lips and tongue had uttered a word.

“Seal.”

(She used magic to cut off the high-voltage current!?)

He slammed on the brakes. If this wouldn’t even act as a smokescreen, charging in like this would only get him killed.

“That seal isn’t just a psychological attack! It works on non-magical things too?”

“My mother did not see the magic side as her only enemy.”

Of course she didn’t. Great Demon Coronzon had ultimately intended to destroy all 7 or 8 billion humans, be they from magic or science.

“You can find seals in mythologies the world over, but the most dynamic would probably be from Greek mythology. After all, Cronus and Zeus both swallowed their pesky children to try and remove them from the world of myth. Of course, those gods were generally immortal, so it didn’t count as killing. It was seen as a seal because they would be back to normal once removed from their father’s belly. Ah ha ha. Doesn’t that remind you of that absurd Red Riding Hood story where she was eaten by a wolf but somehow still had a happy ending?”

Kamijou glared straight at Narthex while moving just his eyes to the sides. Was there anything he could use here? She could seal anything, but was there nothing that would let him use that against her!?

“So seals don’t actually negate the energy the way your Imagine Breaker does. They are much more ecological. They let me remove your deadly force, but I hold the right to release the seal. That means I can effectively steal my enemy’s power and use it myself. A lot like stealing a demon and using them as your servant.”

Narthex Coded Cathedral licked her lips with her little tongue.

And she gave a death sentence.

Before Kamijou could find anything capable of breaking free of this bind.

“So I can have fun like this. …Release!!”

Crash!!!

Fearsome light and noise were released horizontally. It was the ultra-high-voltage current used to power the electromagnetic catapults that launched the drone airbase’s unmanned fighters into the sky. That deadly energy shot across the underground space.

No, that wasn’t all.

Kamijou couldn’t even react.

“Wha-?”

“Even ordinary electricity can have its apparent power multiplied by gathering and sealing it. The capacitors used to amplify the voltage of stun guns are primarily made of insulators like paper or glass. Even a high schooler understands how that works, I hope?”

And it didn’t follow a straight line.

When Narthex swept her outstretched hand from right to left, the destructive energy did the same. The blinding light forming a great serpent of more than a hundred million volts shorted the metal pillars and thick power cables as it targeted Kamijou’s head!!

He could see now why Lola Stuart had kept Narthex a secret.

She was a taboo among taboos.

She was a combination of science and magic that had been treated as a failure for being too successful.

“!!!?”

Part 14

Silence fell.

Even the scent of scorched air seemed to be considerately keeping its distance from people’s senses.

The electric current of more than a hundred million volts had been magically controlled, ensuring a hit.

But Kamijou Touma still wasn’t dead.

Because someone else had made themselves into a human shield.

“…Hama…zura…?”

Narthex Coded Cathedral spoke his name in surprise.

That boy hadn’t wanted to call Coronzon a great demon. He had felt the same way she did.

So why had he saved Coronzon’s killer?

Was that the thing he most wanted to risk his life for!?

“You could have done anything you wanted, so why would you waste it on something so stup- gah…ah…!?”

The girl’s head wobbled.

Something was wrong with the right half of her vision. She didn’t have time to check a mirror, but the capillaries in the white of the eye may have burst, turning the eye bloodshot.

“You aren’t Index.”

And.

Since Hamazura Shiage had shielded him, Kamijou remained standing.

And he could…clench his right fist.

“Kh.”

“So you don’t have an extreme resistance to a grimoire’s toxin. You said that knowledge was as toxic as an original grimoire, right? If you could’ve just used that as much as you wanted, you would’ve just started with that. The only reason you didn’t is because that trump card damages you too, doesn’t it? “

Narthex had the Black_Oneday hacking tool.

She could have used that to damage Academy City and then spread that damage across the world, but she hadn’t.

She launched her cyber attacks with the same decryption skill she would use for a grimoire’s symbolism or a magic circle’s layout.

But that had been a burden on her.

She hadn’t wanted to use it more than necessary.

Because she could tell it was threatening her life.

Otherwise, she would likely have already triggered a major war like Coronzon had attempted with Adikalika.

(It’s just like with Index… When Coronzon gives someone a power, it isn’t going to make them happy. It will destroy their life and transform them into a living secret weapon.)

That great demon could only tear people’s bonds apart. She couldn’t actually save people no matter how hard she tried.

This had so bothered her that she had tried to destroy the world over it, so it did seem a lot like her.

“So you should stop here. The ordinary fear of death is catching up to you, isn’t it? But you see your ability to do these unusual things as your bond with Coronzon, so you don’t want to stop. But it’s not like your memories of her will vanish if you do things normally.”

“Shut up,” snapped Narthex Coded Cathedral. “I loved my mother. I truly respected her… I know so much about her you never knew. She tore people’s bonds apart and obstructed their evolution? That was all she could do? That isn’t true and I’ll prove it… That’s enough of a reason to risk my life.”

She looked around 13 – although her actual age was unknown – but her face was a portrait of fury, hatred, humiliation, scorn, and frustration. Every negative emotion aside from sorrow was contained there.

“You killed my mother.”

Kamijou had no memory before a certain day during summer break.

He knew he had saved Index during that time, but he felt like he hadn’t actually experienced it himself.

Even so, he could tell.

This girl…was an Index who hadn’t met Kamijou Touma.

So she had relied on someone else. Such as viewing her own creator as a parent.

For one, it was the person who had shattered her cage of misfortune. For the other, it was the person who had created her cage of misfortune.

It had all branched out from there.

“But that wasn’t enough, so now you’re going to rob her of the possibility of being reborn and getting a second chance at life? Kamijou Touma. You don’t have the right!! No one does!!!”

Maybe not.

But…

“I might be plagued by misfortune,” said Kamijou.

He didn’t avert his gaze even as he was called a murderer.

Because…

“But I’m still not as miserable as you. Because I had the freedom to overcome my misfortune.”

“Kh.”

“Narthex, your circumstances weren’t your fault. You were made to be that way for someone else’s purposes and benefit. That much is obvious. …And that Great Demon Coronzon did that to you is all the more reason something had to be done about her.”

“My life is none of your business! Don’t barge in and act like you know if I’m happy or not. All that mattered to me was that my mother wasn’t alone!! But you and your smug self-righteousness took everything from her! Including her life!!!”

The girl screamed at him.

With tears in her eyes.

“For so long she called herself the Anglican archbishop! She said her name was Lola Stuart! She couldn’t tell anyone who she really was. Not even her real name!! Because she would be killed if the truth got out! You would know all about that since you’re the one that actually did it. And all because you’d decided getting the whole damn world to gang up on her and attack her was the ‘right thing to do’! …I was the only one she had. I was the only one who knew her name was Coronzon and accepted her for who she was. Only I could save her!!”

That had to be Narthex Coded Cathedral’s true feelings

She had to be coming up with these words on her own.

Looking at this alone, her story sounded like a moving one.

Kamijou Touma’s heart should have ached as the one who fought Coronzon as a great demon and let her die.

But he couldn’t let himself forget.

Narthex had been created by Coronzon. And unlike Index, she hadn’t broken free of Coronzon’s control…so she had never been saved. Just like Index had several layers of security built into her without her consent.

In that case.

Narthex referred to Coronzon as her “mother”.

That was a title of love and respect. Those feelings were likely real. If she had started saying that without being ordered to by her puppeteer, the great demon hadn’t corrected her. And even if it was a mistake or bug her creator hadn’t intended, Kamijou still felt some sympathy for the lonely demon who had wanted to hear that word.

…But he would never be moved by Narthex’s devotion.

Coronzon must never have imagined she would die.

Of course she hadn’t when she had fought to the very end under the wholehearted belief that she would win.

The unintended cage she left behind with her death had to be broken here.

This was a misfortune that not even Coronzon had wanted.

“…I’ll kill you.”

The girl must have realized her words weren’t reaching him.

With a low growl of a voice, Narthex stuck her small hand in the rear of the plush bear. Did it contain a keyboard or a touchscreen? Either way, she must have decided the track ball on its face wasn’t enough.

“You are the one person in this world I swear I will kill! I will smash you into tiny little pieces! …I don’t need your brain to get knowledge of your return from hell when Anna Kingsford’s preserved corpse exists. The border between life and death can be crossed! And I don’t need you to create a vessel for summoning my mother back to this world!!”

But the Six Wings around her did not respond.

“Someone already hacked them and expelled all their fuel?”

Come to think of it, someone had gone missing partway through this battle.

Narthex’s eyes darted around the area.

“Dion Fortune? What has she been doing on this base!?”

But she couldn’t afford to split her focus at the moment.

Insulting someone who wasn’t even present would change nothing. And Kamijou was currently stepping toward her.

“Ohhh!!”

“Hm? No…”

A loud “slap!” rang out.

Kamijou had knocked the plush bear to the floor with his palm. Now she couldn’t use her hacking tool to send commands to the science side weapons.

“Tch!!”

Narthex held out the red apple of knowledge in her other hand. That thing had knocked out Birdway and Lessar, but a moment later it shattered with a solid sound of impact.

Courtesy of Imagine Breaker.

Now the girl couldn’t use science or magic.

And Kamijou Touma had already clenched his right fist.

Tightly.

“If you are convinced Great Demon Coronzon’s death was a mistake. If the remnants of Coronzon still lingering inside you are mechanically making you say that!!”

“Kh.”

(Hey, Coronzon.)

It was like he wanted to show that girl how the great demon had met her end since she hadn’t been there to see it herself.

He threw his words and his fist at her.

(This rampage isn’t the downfall you wanted to see, is it!? So it’s time you gave that girl’s life back!!!)

“Then!! I’ll destroy that illusion!!!”

Part 15

A dull crash.

Part 16

She had fallen.

Narthex Coded Cathedral lay unmoving on the hard floor.

A wet splat came from her.

Kamijou had grabbed something from her back and pulled it away. It was a clear tube…no, several of them. He had physically broken her connection to her second brain. The tubes crumbled away.

Narthex…had lost.

Coronzon would never come back to life.

Hamazura clenched his back teeth. He had stopped her by shielding Kamijou. That was true…but why had that been the only option their side had?

The people who sided with the hated were always, always labeled evil and defeated.

Because what they were doing “wasn’t right”.

Was that so wrong? So much so that the only option was to throw their lives in the gutter?

“Phew…”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet sighed a short distance away.

This was an aircraft hangar. The underground space was so large it could be easy to forget that.

She seemed to be dragging along a great weight. The seal on her metal coat should have been released, but was she still not back at 100%? She was at least doing better than Birdway and Lessar who were still unable to move after being hit by toxic knowledge on the level of an original grimoire.

The emaciated girl sighed.

(It almost feels like everyone else was intentionally taken out of the fight. I guess the only person left who I need to keep away from here is Dion Fortune, wherever she is on the base.)

“Hamazura, are you alive?”

“Even though I doubt anyone in the world wants me to be,” sulked Hamazura.

He knew he was actually lucky to have his girlfriend and a Transcendent on his side.

So. Was he supposed to just accept the world’s idea of what was “right” and head home?

“I feel bad saying this Hamazura, but Coronzon herself really was evil. I don’t think you’re going to convince anyone otherwise.”

“I know.”

Hamazura wasn’t going to deny that any longer.

But…

“I still wanted to be her friend. What’s wrong with that?”

“Heh. That look on your face is more like it. Then I’ll let you handle the rest.”

Narthex had been defeated. Hamazura didn’t know what she had been planning, but it wasn’t going to happen now. Coronzon was dead and nothing would change that. He felt like something unseen was holding his head down and had placed a thick lid over him.

“…”

Takitsubo Rikou…was safe.

But Hamazura didn’t run over to her.

He couldn’t return yet. He hadn’t ended this yet.

So.

After shaking free of Blodeuwedd the Bouquet who weakly waved her hand, he firmly changed direction.

To face someone else: Kamijou Touma.

“Narthex Coded Cathedral was trying to destroy the world for Coronzon and she wanted to crack open your head and bring her back. …I’ve been trying to figure out what I can do for Coronzon now that she’s dead, but I didn’t think either of those things would do that. That’s why I helped you. I’m still not sure I should have and I kind of wish I hadn’t.”

“I see…”

“But this doesn’t mean I’ve forgiven you for killing Coronzon.”

He couldn’t.

No matter what. It wasn’t a matter of right or wrong.

“Coronzon chose for herself to take the path of evil, so you had no choice?”

What a joke.

There were people who couldn’t do the right thing.

They wanted to and they admired those who did more than anyone, but they believed someone as wretched as them couldn’t…and so they pulled back the hand they actually wanted to reach out.

Hamazura wouldn’t let anyone say otherwise.

Because that had been him.

When he was labeled a Level 0 and then crushed by the pressure of being the new leader of Skill Out. He had rotted to the core back then, but he hadn’t crawled back out on his own. Only after running across Item, meeting people like Mugino and Takitsubo, and overcoming a great battle had he finally found himself. Yes, it had taken a collection of factors he normally never could have hoped to encounter.

Had Coronzon been given a chance like that?

She had always been alone.

The entire world had labeled her an absolute evil.

She hadn’t had a chance to crawl back out and no one had held out their hand.

Instead, they had gathered around, forced her into even worse circumstances, and called her evil for not figuring out her mistake all on her own. Was that how this world worked!?

Pain. Fear. Agony. Suffering.

It was true Coronzon had never uttered a word of it on that red snowy night.

Being who she was, Coronzon must have proudly stuck to her role as the powerful enemy to the very end.

But…

“Are you kidding me, Kamijou Touma? The people who are suffering and in pain can’t even ask for help. It might seem easy to you!! But they’ve been pushed to the point they’ve lost sight of what’s normal. So they try to act bad, they turn their back on you, and they convince themselves it’s better that way!”

Even as he shouted the words, Hamazura realized this really was the side for him.

This was a risk.

He could tell he was tumbling further down the slope.

This temporary awakening didn’t come from evil. He knew this was no more than a power that brought him closer to death, but still he did it.

It was time to draw a line in the sand.

They could call him evil if they wanted. He didn’t need justice or righteousness here!!

“She couldn’t say it. Coronzon couldn’t manage to get the words out. But that doesn’t excuse you for killing her!!!”

On his way here today, Hamazura had opposed goodness and justice in a number of ways. But that didn’t mean all evil was destructive and deadly. He must have gotten a blow or two in on the existing idea of goodness by saving some strangers along the way.

Between good and evil, Coronzon had been evil.

But preferring evil didn’t mean she had to destroy humanity.

Villains could be kind to people in their own evil way.

If someone had taught her that, maybe she could have developed her evil in that direction and grown into something else. If the world had been willing to compromise with her, maybe she could have found a place for herself and lived there.

But no one had.

Everyone had stubbornly refused to do so!

On that night, even Hamazura had spoken in support of the destruction she was plotting. He had acted like he was on her side, but he had really been pushing her away by calling her a harmful being who would destroy the world!

What had Coronzon really wanted him to say?

Had it actually devastated her when she had heard him speak up in support of her destructive plan using Adikalika?

What if he had insisted she was too kind a person to destroy the world?

Yes, that was it.

He had already known he was stupid, so why hadn’t he been able to say that stupid thing!?

Even if it wasn’t true, wouldn’t Coronzon have wanted to hear someone say it to her? He knew it was a silly thing to consider. Maybe proud Coronzon was shouting resentfully up at him from the pit of hell, saying not to twist his memories to reduce her to something so weak. …But what if that really had been all it was? If so, then the one who had ultimately cut her lifeline and shoved her off the cliff was none other than Hamazura himself!!

Coronzon hadn’t figured out how to use evil.

If she wanted to save someone, she had been free to do so from the side of evil.

What had kept her from realizing that?

And who had killed her before she could realize it?

(That’s obvious.)

He couldn’t run away.

What could he do for Coronzon? He had come all this way in search of an answer.

So Hamazura Shiage would not run away from here.

The rest of the world had called Coronzon a great demon, thrown stones at her, and spat on her.

But.

There were 8 billion people out there. So couldn’t there be just one idiot who clenched his fist for her?

(I encouraged her and you killed her to stop her. We share the blame for believing too much in our own ridiculous ideas of what’s right!!)

Part 17

Kamijou Touma.

I will never, ever forgive you!!!

Chapter 4: What the Fugitive Saw – Fumble.

Part 1

They were in the aircraft hangar deep below the drone airbase.

It was time to take on Kamijou Touma.

They were the only two who could still move.

Hamazura Shiage and Kamijou Touma. …Did you really think it would be a fair fight!?

“Aneri!!”

Hamazura shouted that name before their fists crossed and a powerful impact rang out.

It was already having an effect.

Kamijou’s fist found only air, but Hamazura had moved closer in and his fist accurately caught Kamijou on the cheekbone. He felt the dull, heavy, and unpleasant sensation.

But he didn’t stop there.

“→P” “←←K” “→TPK→←KK↓K” AI Aneri’s predictions really were accurate. Kamijou tried to punch, kick, grab, and bite, but none of it found its mark. Meanwhile, Hamazura’s attacks all seemed drawn straight toward him.

Simply following the instructions gave him clean and accurate movements.

“I decided I’d find something I can do for Coronzon. I still don’t know what that is, but that’s what I decided.”

A dull sound.

A heavy sensation.

It should have all been unpleasant.

“But I know one thing for sure… Making friends with you sure ain’t it!!”

Part 2

Over and over, dull impacts echoed through the giant underground space.

An iron flavor spread through Kamijou Touma’s world. Try as he might to defend and dodge, Hamazura Shiage’s punches and kicks mercilessly stabbed at him.

“Kh.”

Was anything allowable if it was “the right thing to do”?

Kamijou thought Hamazura had a point there.

But on the other hand…

(Not everything is allowable just because you can claim the other person was wrong or corrupt!!)

Hamazura was trying to overcome things like goodness and justice.

Kamijou could tell Hamazura so wanted to turn his back on the things that hadn’t saved him that he had overcorrected in the other direction. But that was the same as joining a criminal organization because you couldn’t trust the police. That would only lead you down the path of evil. You would only find a different kind of corruption, not a righteousness surpassing that of justice. And by the time you figured that out and tried to fix things, the normal path would no longer be available to you.

What would happen to Hamazura if he crossed that point of no return?

Would he reach a point where killing him was the only way to stop him?

Just like Coronzon?

No.

Kamijou couldn’t let that happen!!

(I’m not going to repeat that ending again and again!!)

“Gah!!”

He took another blow to the center of the face.

The iron flavor filled his mouth.

But he wouldn’t give up.

Hamazura had to be stopped here. This was happening to him because Kamijou had let Coronzon die. It had been necessary. The entire world would have continued down the path of doom if he hadn’t done it. He believed it and he knew it had been the right thing to do, but that didn’t mean he could just ignore the resentment it had created!

He knew what he had to do, but he couldn’t manage it.

Hamazura had that AI Aneri on his side.

Kamijou couldn’t defeat and stop Hamazura without an irregular ability rivaling that.

He only needed one.

Just one thing rivaling that!!

“Then summon me already, partner.”

A dull crack came from his right shoulder.

Part 3

It would be over after the next move, or the one after that.

Hamazura Shiage was sure of it. He wasn’t Kamijou Touma, so he wouldn’t choose to fight or happily hurt his enemy. He was sick of this already. Aneri’s predictions were wonderful, but this one-sided pummeling weighed him down with a weird sense of guilt.

But his advantage suddenly became a lot less absolute.

It happened right after a dull crack echoed across the vast underground space.

Kamijou made a sharp reversal to dodge Hamazura’s right hook.

Physically speaking, that was all it was.

Hamazura’s accuracy dropped from 100% to 99%. No more than that.

But…

(He outdid Aneri’s predictions with a physical action!?)

“Khahh!?”

Hamazura’s eyes widened just before the impact hit him. A body blow targeting his liver shot through him.

Kamijou had finally managed a clean hit.

And with that move, it all began to shift in an unpleasant direction.

So what?

Coronzon was dead.

Did that guy get to look down on him after taking someone’s life? Hamazura wasn’t letting that villain claim justice for himself!!

“Ah, kah…Aneri!!”

Hamazura shouted an instruction and then backed away.

But Kamijou must have predicted even that because he charged forward at the same moment, not letting Hamazura put any distance between them.

They were evenly matched.

A fierce rush of attacks began, with no clear winner.

“Hey, AI slave.”

No.

“I’m not as kind or gentle as this guy. After all, I am the very power to destroy illusions.”

This was entirely different from Kamijou Touma’s earlier movements.

“You want to do something for Coronzon? Don’t make me laugh. You’re just letting an imaginary Coronzon tell you to do the things you already want to do so you don’t have to feel guilty about it. The dead tell no tales, right? Well, are you having fun playing with the sex doll you made out of that dead woman? I bet you think you’re so badass turning your back on goodness and justice. That’s the next illusion I’ll be destroying!!”

“Damn you!!!”

Hamazura threw a furious punch, but Kamijou only had to lean back a bit to dodge it.

He avoided another Aneri-supported attack. Aneri’s calculations were no longer a trump card. But he wasn’t getting help from a program.

He had something rivaling Aneri.

But what was possessing him right now!?

Part 4

After dodging a few punches and kicks, Kamijou backed away from Hamazura. He adjusted the distance between them.

And he shook his head.

He consciously worked to stay conscious.

(“Feel free to stay awake.”)

He heard a voice with no distance to it.

His mouth wasn’t moving. This wasn’t a sound reverberating through the underground space. So where was it coming from?

(“I’m not that count. I’m not gonna take over your body. Popping in and out at random will work better. That AI is watching your exterior and gathering detailed data to calculate out the next thing you’ll do. You’re fighting right in front of him, so there’s no preventing the AI from gathering data. But. If the Kamijou Touma folder contains a mix of data from more than one person, it can’t predict your personality, can it? So if we work together to mess with its calculations, his precious AI won’t be worth shit.”)

“You…”

(“Don’t you get mad. You’re not trying to be some bleach-white paragon of justice, are you? Provocation is a valid tactic. People’s lives are on the line here. At the end of the day, you want to save that idiot’s life, don’t you? Even if it means punching him a few times.”)

“…”

(“Well, if you want to win this, stop Hamazura, and save him, you can’t let yourself hesitate just cause it’s getting a little messy. Or are you a galge heroine who only ever speaks the whole truth? Yeah right, dumbass.”)

Was this really a part of Kamijou? It felt like a bad joke that this foul-mouthed right arm had once mimicked his physical form and tried to take everything from him. And that its advice was efficient and sensible only annoyed Kamijou further. If it could make such sharp calculations, why couldn’t it predict how he would feel listening to it?

He tried arguing back with something other than numerical correctness.

“I want to be on the side of justice too. But I don’t need Hamazura to tell me that’s not possible. I’m well aware I disqualified myself from that as soon as my immediate response to any problem is to clench my fist!”

(“Are you stupid? If you never want to doubt you’re doing the right thing, then let a Magic God, a Transcendent, or some other divinity decide for you. But you’re human. You’re the kind of ordinary high school boy you can find anywhere. Noncommittal hypocrisy is a lot more fitting, don’t you think?”)

At any rate, that AI was the problem.

Kamijou couldn’t settle things with Hamazura without first doing something about Aneri’s power.

Part 5

He thought. Hamazura Shiage kept thinking through the entire fistfight.

Kamijou was doing something.

That something was throwing off Aneri’s predictions. If this continued, he wouldn’t be able to rely on Aneri’s support.

But…

“Aneri. You don’t have to predict each individual punch and kick. Focus on figuring out what he’s doing. Taking a few hits is a small price to pay for figuring out his trick!!”

Ultimately, anything Kamijou did was a physical action located in this underground space. That made it a game of cat and mouse. And he had a limited number of cards in his deck. If Aneri could figure out his trick, Hamazura could fight back.

Meanwhile, Hamazura didn’t try to go on the attack and instead fended off Kamijou’s attacks to buy time. That had to be the least painful option, but Kamijou of course didn’t want his cheap trick to be discovered.

So he would try to end this while he still had an advantage!!

“!!”

Hamazura worked to guard his face while Kamijou charged at him. Was he going to rush in and unleash a flurry of attacks while prepared to take a few hits in return?

(I don’t have to play by your rules here!!)

Trying to fight back while Aneri’s predictions weren’t working would be foolish.

“An open space isn’t great for buying time. Aneri, do you have any spare resources? Get a list of every door in here, search out their locations, and unlock as many of them as you can!!”

The twin buzzes had a negative nuance, but he did hear the locks click open.

But why did this have to be the closest door?

Hamazura kicked a nearby toolbox to keep Kamijou back and used the brief opening to turn to the right.

He ran up some narrow stairs and slipped through an open door.

The space was about half the width of a classroom and more than twice as long. It was cluttered and better suited for hiding and launching surprise attacks than before, but…

All the doors suddenly slammed shut. And the locks engaged.

His phone sounded its loudest alarm. Aneri wanted his attention.

An artificial-sounding young woman’s voice played from all around.

Kamijou had done something again.

“Level 3 Authorization confirmed. Flight preparations complete. Takeoff route secured. Countdown beginning at January 9, 7:30 PM.”

Surprise colored Hamazura’s face, but it didn’t end there.

He heard a footstep.

Had Kamijou actually come in here with all this going on?

He could have won by launching Hamazura into the vacuum of space, but he hadn’t. Did he think Hamazura could get Aneri to take control of the craft and land it on the other side of the planet? Kamijou was afraid of losing track of Hamazura. He wanted to avoid living his life while Hamazura was hiding out on the other side of the planet and could launch a surprise attack at any time. So he wanted to end this here and now.

All doubt vanished from Hamazura. He gathered strength in his gut.

She was a great demon?

Don’t make me laugh. What right do you have to call her that? As if you have a perfect and spotless heart.

(Your ugly weakness is showing, you righteous good guy!!)

So what exactly was happening here?

Part 6

The Jumbo Dragonfly was a two-stage air-launched bullet space shuttle.

Their battlefield was preparing…to launch into space!?

Part 7

The tremendous acceleration weighed on Hamazura Shiage’s insides.

They had taken off.

(What kind of tunnels was that underground area connected to!?)

“Ane…ri… What are this thing’s specs!?”

All sorts of data appeared on the cracked screen.

The Jumbo Dragonfly took off from the ground by using a runway and gradually gaining altitude, much like an airplane.

But after stabilizing its flight, it would raise its nose to nearly vertical and accelerate. After nearly reaching the limits of an aircraft at an altitude of 30 thousand meters, the spaceship at the very front would separate from the rest. The bullet-shaped module would use its momentum to soar through the atmosphere and reach an altitude of 400km, which was known as low Earth orbit.

…As that explanation suggests, this was a civilian use of a satellite killer project that would launch a missile from a supersonic aircraft to blow up an enemy’s military satellite.

There were sturdy airtight doors between cabins to ensure no oxygen could escape in an emergency, but those were slowly opening from the outside.

And from the back of the long, narrow space…

Kamijou Touma emerged.

Hamazura was exposed to a crushing g-force that was clearly greater than Earth’s natural gravity, but a different question occupied his thoughts.

“Wait. How did he mess with the computers without an AI supporting him?”

If he had something equivalent to Aneri, what was it? After all, this spaceship tearing through the atmosphere was a collection of computers. Anything could become a weapon if operated incorrectly.

Hamazura raised his guard, but then it hit him.

“No, it wasn’t necessarily him!! The base’s infrastructure would activate if anyone in the base hit the switch. It could have been Birdway or Fortune that helped him!”

Didn’t that mean that shifting the fight to the Jumbo Dragonfly was actually a bad thing for Kamijou? Then why do it? It wasn’t like Hamazura had been hiding Aneri’s presence.

No…

No!?

This situation did help Kamijou!!

(So that’s it…)

Hamazura belatedly realized Kamijou’s aim here.

But it was too late to do anything about it.

(If we leave the Earth in a spaceship with a broken antenna, Aneri will be cut off from everything on the surface. Is he trying to downgrade Aneri to no more than a smartphone!?)

“Aneri, answer me. Can you keep going!?”

He received an immediate buzz in response, but it wasn’t promising.

There was no next action – like “G→→PKT” – displayed on the screen. Even in Academy City, a single phone just didn’t have the processing power.

Meanwhile, he was up against Kamijou Touma and whatever it was that rivaled Aneri.

The situation had been completely reversed from when the fight began.

…So would Hamazura raise the white flag and return to the peaceful world that was glad Coronzon had died? Unharmed and with a silly grin on his face? Sucking up to their righteousness so they would share some of their happiness with him?

“Immediately open all the spaceship’s doors, Aneri!! I don’t care what happens as long as I can kill him!!!”

Aneri refused with two buzzes.

The AI’s victory condition was defined as Hamazura Shiage’s survival, not Kamijou Touma’s death. The damn thing had changed that setting on its own!!

(That means I can’t get Aneri to blow the spaceship away with the laser or mass driver back on the surface either!!)

Having that “insurance” in his back pocket just in case would help mentally bolster him, but the AI must not have understood that kind of abstract subtlety.

And his enemy wasn’t going to wait.

That “just in case” moment had arrived. That monster drenched in justice was coming this way!!

Part 8

Kamijou also regretted his choices.

Approaching from the rear of the spaceship had been necessary, but it may have been a mistake. As Hamazura attempted to keep his distance, he naturally backed toward the nose.

(That’s not good… That’s the bullet-shaped spaceship. If we end up flying outside the atmosphere, it’s all the more likely he’ll end up dead!)

What was this disturbing trend? Wasn’t this kind of misfortune supposed to gather around Kamijou? This felt like an invisible hand had grabbed Hamazura and was dragging him down into the murky depths.

The Jumbo Dragonfly was an aircraft, not a rocket, so it didn’t fly straight up toward space. Still, its nose was pointed very nearly vertically. Kamijou was forced to climb a steep slope to reach Hamazura.

And the Jumbo Dragonfly had two stages.

More than 70% of the sleek aircraft-like spacecraft would only fly up to the stratosphere before naturally descending and then flying back to the runway, but the remaining 30% was a different story.

(“Your misfortune’s not gonna make it easy for you, so prepare yourself. If you really want to settle this, anyway. He’s ready at least. He’s honed himself in exchange for accepting the risk of death. You don’t have time to be falling behind when it comes to resolve.”)

His right arm was talking to him.

And he couldn’t afford to wait until they left the atmosphere.

AI Aneri might not remain cut off forever. It was no more than technology. If communications recovered in some way, they would be back to evenly matched.

Thus…

“I’ll settle this while I can!!”

Kamijou forced himself to charge in.

Maybe it was due to constantly flying with its nose angled more sharply upwards than a normal passenger plane could, but the g-force inside the Jumbo Dragonfly was intense. Each step he took seemed to sap his strength.

Fist crossed fist and struck sharply into each other’s face.

He had no sense for how the g-force affected this.

Kamijou was just glad he hadn’t missed again. Aneri really couldn’t provide any support here. So he would never have a better chance at ending this than now!

That thought was cut off by something slamming into the bridge of Kamijou’s nose.

An iron flavor spread through his mouth.

“Gah!?”

(Dammit, Hamazura. Did he grab an AED or something from the wall and throw it!?)

Hamazura probably just hadn’t had time to charge it, but Kamijou was thankful he hadn’t been attacked by a high-voltage current.

Their fists weren’t their only weapons. They could strangle each other with the seat belts and the oxygen tanks larger than fire extinguishers could cause damage as a blunt weapon or an explosive.

But…

(This isn’t it. I don’t want a bloody ending like this!!)

Seeing Hamazura was shaking Kamijou’s view of Coronzon’s death.

Of course, it wasn’t necessarily possible to get all 8 billion people in the world to smile together right away. But he had fought a deadly battle against Coronzon because he hadn’t wanted that world to be destroyed. That much was true.

He had let Coronzon die, so he had to show her that, while the world was riddled with mistakes, it was headed in a happier direction, even if slowly.

So he couldn’t let Hamazura die here today!!

The “fwoosh!!” of escaping air sounded behind Kamijou. The emergency lock activated on the thick airlock he had just passed through. The second-stage bullet-shaped spaceship taking up nearly a third of the craft was preparing to break away.

This space was fairly large, but it felt somehow like a cockpit. Kamijou wasn’t familiar with the basic structure of a spaceship, so he couldn’t say if this was standard or unorthodox.

And just as Kamijou shook off the temptation to grab a weapon, Hamazura didn’t hesitate to grab a nearby metal pipe. It looked like a component for a crutch or stretcher. Were spaceship beds adapted from medical equipment?

The blunt weapon swung down toward Kamijou’s head, but…

“…!? It’s so light!!”

That wide-eyed shout came from Hamazura as he made the attack.

His feet were floating a bit from the floor. The reaction of the attack sent him floating backwards.

Kamijou didn’t have time to glance out the window of course…but the Jumbo Dragonfly’s nose portion must have broken free of the Earth and arrived in space. Only the flat cone-like tip. So any attack with a weapon that relied on weight had been nearly neutralized. For the moment anyway!

A force was applied to their bodies again.

This space flight was actually a long ballistic trajectory that kept them just outside the atmosphere in low Earth orbit at an altitude of less than 40 kilometers. Flying so rapidly in an arc created a g-force in the outward direction, so they weren’t truly weightless.

If they did fall back to Earth, where on the planet would they end up?

That question honestly frightened Kamijou, but he didn’t have time to check.

His top priority right now was to rescue Hamazura who was spiraling down after being caught by something unseen. Because Kamijou had set him on this path.

Part 9

The spaceship portion had broken free from the rest of the Jumbo Dragonfly.

It had flown away from the Earth.

Hamazura had imagined himself losing all sense of weight, floating around, and having trouble fighting…but the reality was completely different. He felt a little lighter than usual, which was weird, but he could still stand. He had weight. It was actually the centrifugal force or something, but there was gravity.

But it wasn’t normal.

His feet were standing on thick glass.

The seats were positioned at a weird angle, but that didn’t mean they were on the wall.

Hamazura was standing at a weird position.

“Kh.”

He clenched his teeth.

The guy who had called Coronzon a great demon and mercilessly killed her stood before him. He had to settle things with him.

(The power…to destroy illusions?)

Hamazura Shiage had shaken free of his admiration for goodness and justice by saving strangers from his position on the side of evil.

But Kamijou Touma, who hated him more than anyone, carried the power to negate illusions, anything supernatural, and even divine miracles.

They weren’t opposites.

Kamijou wasn’t a perfect form of justice. It was possible he too felt something off about the world and had attempted to fight that unseen thing.

But their paths had never crossed.

And they had definitively parted when he called Coronzon a great demon and killed her!!

“Gahhh!!”

They clashed again.

But without Aneri’s assistance, a Level 0 was only a Level 0.

Hamazura felt dull pain.

Sure enough, he was the one receiving a thrashing. As if to say he was the world’s designated loser.

(To hell…with that…)

Just then.

His cracked phone buzzed.

“→→K←PK→GPP←←K”

(Aneri’s processing power…is back!?)

Had Aneri found a way to communicate without using the broken antenna? No, maybe reaching space had simply brought them close enough to a satellite or space station.

Either way…

(We’re evenly matched again.)

“Go down. Already!!!”

“→P” “PKTK” “←→P” “K→PK” “KKPKGGPKKPP”

A dramatic change came over Hamazura’s movements. Now he could break free of Kamijou and whatever threat he was up against. He had been stuck on the defensive, but now he could swing his fists and throw kicks. He could now rejoin the fight for overall control of the situation.

And for a brief moment, his mind went blank.

AI Aneri provided no instructions.

No.

He was moving even faster than Aneri’s precise instructions. On his own. Was this what Blodeuwedd the Bouquet had been talking about? His body was moving at a speed of thought that surpassed the AI!

(Yes, that’s right.)

Hamazura filled the blank in his mind by thinking for himself.

This was one thing even Aneri likely couldn’t predict.

(You don’t have to be someone special. You can be a Level 0. It doesn’t matter If you’re a villain or hated. Everyone has the power to surprise people and change both the world and the future!!)

And the same probably applied to his opponent.

To Kamijou Touma.

He had started out as a Level 0, but he hadn’t stopped there.

And that bastard was speaking.

“Hey. Did you know Great Demon Coronzon?”

“Yeah. I knew her so much better than you.”

They approached each other.

They clenched their bloody fists and faced each other.

Kamijou knew a Coronzon that Hamazura hadn’t.

Hamazura knew a Coronzon that Kamijou hadn’t.

So.

They both roared at once.

“Tell me all about the Coronzon I never knew!!!” “Tell me all about the Coronzon I never knew!!!”

And Hamazura Shiage and Kamijou Touma chose to approach to critical range.

They exploded into a fistfight.

And shouted.

“In Edinburgh, Coronzon helped me save Dion Fortune! She went on and on about how it benefited her, but that didn’t mean she needed to do it. She could have abandoned me at any time, but she stuck with a weakling like me to the end!!”

“That great demon deceived the Anglican Church to hold the position of Archbishop while she secretly advanced her wicked ends. She despaired in the state of the world and tried to create a new one herself. With no thought to what kind of being would flourish in the coming age! She was an embodiment of evil, but she was also hopelessly tidy and fastidious!!”

“Kh. Coronzon told me to rest when I was worn out from running away for so long. She did these things because she wanted someone to accept her… But not for her power or her evil nature. She just wanted to be thanked for those ordinary things!!”

“When she screwed people’s lives up to the point of creating Index and Narthex? When she didn’t hesitate to slash Tsushima’s throat and kick her out into the open to achieve her goal? …Don’t make me laugh. She was a more powerful demon than that!”

“Coronzon was!! A lonely girl!!!”

“No!! That great demon was humanity’s greatest nemesis!!!”

The sounds of blows landing continued.

Kamijou spat blood from his mouth, but he had a smile on his fierce face.

He was proudly discussing Coronzon as if she were his greatest rival. Calling her powerful, great, and cool.

(Why?)

Hamazura clenched his teeth within the metallic flavor.

The person who pissed him off the most wasn’t Kamijou here. It was Hamazura himself.

He was just so pathetic. The more he said, the smaller it made Coronzon seem.

(Why do you know so much about Coronzon that I don’t!?)

“Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!”

“Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!”

Part 10

As he threw and took punches, even his sense of pain faded into a general sense of heat.

Red drops scattered through the spaceship like jewels.

But Kamijou kept working his woozy mind.

…Hamazura might want him to apologize. He might want Kamijou to cry and wail that killing Coronzon had been a mistake.

But if so…

“I’m not apologizing.”

Kamijou said it.

Clearly and in his own words.

“If there had been any other way, I wouldn’t have done it in the first place!! Great Demon Coronzon was a true nemesis who would have destroyed the entire world all on her own. She showed no mercy or weakness. I wouldn’t take someone’s life unless I absolutely had to!!!”

That ending was a bitter pill to swallow, wasn’t it?

So he wouldn’t let this boy reach the same ending as Coronzon.

Even if it meant hitting him. Even if it meant being hit by him.

He would stop him even if it meant not playing fair and being hated.

He would save Hamazura here!!

“Yeah, right…”

A splitting sound came from terribly close by.

Equally battered Hamazura had bit into his lip with his canine tooth.

His anger had passed its limit.

“If you really, truly felt bad about killing Coronzon, you’d stop clinging to your pathetic life and just go to hell already!!”

Kamijou accepted the words along with a tightly clenched fist.

In a world that tasted so much of iron, Kamijou actually smiled a little.

“I already know all about hell. And I know it’s where I belong.”

Which was why he had decided he wouldn’t let Hamazura go there.

If he had done the right thing…

If he hadn’t been wrong to kill Coronzon to save the world, then Kamijou would be able to crawl back out of hell even if he wound up there.

But…

“This time I’ll do it without sacrificing Kingsford and CRC.”

He didn’t need to doubt himself.

Kamijou Touma threw his fist.

Part 11

It was so very heavy.

The impact was different from the previous ones as it entered Hamazura through the bridge of his nose and rattled the core of his body.

His consciousness faded.

Who was most to blame?

That was obvious. It wasn’t Kamijou. At least when it came to Coronzon, that bastard wasn’t at the center of it. That central position belonged to someone else.

…In the end, Hamazura was most to blame for failing to stop Coronzon even if it meant punching her.

He was an idiot without a shred of medical knowledge, but he could still tell his body had passed some kind of line. He could feel the strength leaving his knees. Before long, his consciousness would follow. And once he lost that balance, everything would continue to tumble downhill.

Could he not do it?

A single phrase entered his mind: I knew it.

He had expected this result. And he had prepared a way to overturn it.

This really is the end. So clench your teeth, me.

“Let’s end this, Kamijou Touma.”

Hamazura pulled out a handgun.

But he didn’t aim it at Kamijou.

It was loaded with a single round. He couldn’t afford to use it on the fight.

Besides, he had decided he couldn’t accept that guy’s path. So he wouldn’t stoop to his level. No matter what.

Instead, Hamazura pressed the muzzle against his own temple.

Without hesitation.

(Yeah, that’s right.)

Kamijou’s eyes widened in surprise.

Hilarious. He must not have ever had a fight like this.

(I knew from the start I couldn’t win a pleasant victory over you by just clenching my fists!!)

There was a great system running the world.

But it wasn’t the kind thing everyone thought it was.

…If it were, Coronzon wouldn’t have suffered so. Her function was to tear people’s bonds apart and obstruct their evolution. That was one of the gears built into that great system. She had tried to change the world because she hadn’t been willing to accept that. She had wanted to rebuild the world from the ground up into something that could run without her gear as a part of it.

If nothing he could do could defeat that system…

Then at least he could unveil it for all to see.

By proving that the current world would not save the weak.

Even if he had to use his own life to do it!!

And.

“Did you think you could save the world with violence, Kamijou Touma?”

At the same time, he couldn’t let justice belong that guy of all people.

And if he could steal “righteousness” from the guy who killed Coronzon…

He was willing to give up his life.

“You win. You beat Coronzon and you beat me. I’ll give you that. But if you had done the right thing, Narthex Coded Cathedral never would have gone astray. Don’t think you’ve saved everyone… I’ll show you. And now it’s your turn to be punished as evil by the righteous. Your actions led to this. Live the rest of your life knowing that this kind of ruin is what taking a life leads to!!!”

Kamijou frantically clenched his first and charged in, but it was too late.

Live a long life.

As long as possible.

Cause I’m turning the rest of your life into a living hell.

No matter what you do, my finger is faster.

His awakening wasn’t fueled by evil. It had already been said several times that it was a power that brings him closer to death.

And he brought that to its final conclusion.

Part 12

He had pulled the trigger.

It was already a thing of the past.

Part 13

Silence.

The flow of time had stopped.

Or so the overwhelming silence made it seem.

And.

Hamazura Shiage’s eyes dropped to the gun he held.

Yes, Hamazura was not dead.

The bullet had not been fired.

… He was not holding a revolver. It was an automatic pistol that loaded each new round into the chamber from the magazine. So each pull of the trigger wasn’t a gamble. If there was a round in the chamber, the odds of firing should have been 100%.

(Did the weird gravity screw up the springs in the gun?)

Hamazura rejected his own speculation.

He was pretty sure he knew what it was.

(No, that isn’t it. The trigger feels weirdly hard against my finger… Did being in outer space change the gun oil so it hardened!?)

It was possible.

Hadn’t he heard that important spaceship components didn’t use liquid lubricant?

The gun hadn’t been designed for extraterrestrial use, so the manufacturer and factory wouldn’t have performed the relevant stress testing and durability testing. So he couldn’t deny the possibility.

But could he calculate the odds of the gun oil actually changing like that? The oil’s nature changing in such a short time was strange enough, but it had also happened in just the right way to jam up the gun’s components. The odds of that had to be less than 1 in a 100 million, right!?

Yet it had happened.

The unthinkable had unnaturally, unreasonably, and unfairly happened.

The supernatural, the paranormal, misfortune, the gears, the tendencies.

No. What was an illusion exactly?

Did the system that caused those things actually exist in this world!?

Hamazura could only speak in a daze at this point.

“Are you…kidding me?”

A moment later, Kamijou reached him.

A fist slammed into the center of his face, immediately removing his consciousness.

Epilogue: The Seed Has Been Sown – Question.

A trio of parachutes opened.

The British government plane wasn’t needed after all.

Because the Jumbo Dragonfly bullet-shaped spaceship had crossed many national borders while drifting outside the atmosphere.

“Did we…manage to survive?”

No one answered Kamijou’s question.

He didn’t know what logic had led that right arm bastard to make an appearance, but he must have withdrawn once more to wherever it was he went. Not knowing what made that selfish guy show up was worrying. Kamijou had heard a crack from his shoulder, but that didn’t tell him much.

At any rate, after opening the parachutes, they had landed in the ocean near England, so he had successfully handed Hamazura over to them.

Even after traveling halfway around the world, it was still winter here, meaning it was cold. They had fallen into the ocean, so opening the airtight doors to let a boat pick them up had gotten him soaking wet. He didn’t know the specifics of how the UK’s system worked or how it was organized, but aboard a government-seeming patrol boat, he wrapped himself in the blanket he was given and watched what happened to the other boy.

“…”

(He’ll probably resent me. And so will his girlfriend. Takitsubo, was it?)

Kamijou didn’t know what would happen to Hamazura Shiage now.

Hamazura knew nothing of the magic side and thus hadn’t understood how much of a threat Coronzon was…and that was how he let her get to him. But he probably couldn’t get away with that argument anymore.

The Anglicans would judge him a threat to their country and the world.

He would be judged as someone who had bet on Coronzon. Just like he had wanted.

And so Hamazura Shiage’s battle came to a close. It ended in defeat. In a way, exactly as he had expected from the start.

No one in Academy City would hear what he had to say and take his message to heart. Because not even his girlfriend Takitsubo Rikou had understood why he was fighting for Coronzon.

So had it all been a meaningless struggle?

No.

“…”

Kamijou Touma had arrived at a certain international airport.

It had just occurred to him he had flown here through space, so he didn’t have his passport with him.

Now he couldn’t return to Japan!!

“Oh, ohhh. Ohhhhhhh…”

(Don’t just dump me here, Anglicans! How about actually helping me get home!? Especially when I just cleaned up your scandal for free!)

Of course, the British government would see him as having flown through space and fallen in their territorial waters without permission, so maybe he should be thankful they hadn’t shot down the “unidentified flying object” with a long-range SAM or seized the “suspicious boat” by force.

“You really are hopeless. You said you were at Heathrow, right? I’ll call in Mark whose been sulking about having to stay behind in London, so just follow their instructions and they’ll smuggle you into Japan. Don’t worry. This won’t mean stuffing you into a cargo container for a sweaty months-long voyage. With a personal jet bought under a fake name, it’ll only take half a day. …After setting down in the Academy City airport, that toy will have to be abandoned along with the fake name, but oh well. Nothing is truly free.”

“Umm, Birdway? I feel like you’re only getting me to commit even more crimes…”

“Would you prefer spending the rest of your life as an illegal resident in England? That’s fine with me. In fact, I could use another plaything for my garden. But I would recommend caution. Immigration has become a delicate topic in England and the rest of Europe lately.”

Smartphones were so convenient.

In recent times, you didn’t have to worry about the high cost of international phone calls.

Free talk apps were truly a wonderful invention.

It made him happy just to hear the Japanese language while surrounded by all the English in England. Although from a global perspective, someone who could only speak Japanese like him was in the minority.

(And in the end, I never did find my proof of life document! Am I really going to be held back now!?)

“The Anglican Church has made no official announcement regarding Narthex Coded Cathedral. That she was a secret research project run by Lola Stuart – aka Great Demon Coronzon – appears to have helped it end this way, for better or for worse. If she has nowhere to go, the Dawn-Colored Sunlight will take her in. She’s fascinating, both as a special fighter and as proof of scandal to use against the Anglicans.”

“Ahhh!! You can’t just take her like that!” shouted Lessar in the background of the call. “I was going to call dibs on her for N∴L∴! I mean, she’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum level and no one knows about her!”

“Consider the size of our cabals. Did you really think you could tell me what to do, small time? Besides, weren’t you supposed to be tracking down the two troublesome Transcendents who vanished under your nose?”

“Ahh, ahh, I can’t hear you! Tracking down two people fleeing in different directions simply isn’t possible!”

“We’ll need to make sure Coronzon didn’t leave any more weird presents like Index and Narthex hidden away in some nook or cranny. Letting the Anglicans lead the search would probably just let all this happen again, so this sounds like a job for the Dawn-Colored Sunlight.”

“Also, the Anglicans were so humiliated they’re backing off way more than they usually would, so if you want to pull anything, now would be the time. Although the ones with thicker skin – like that Stiyl and I think Isabella too – already returned to England.”

“Hold on,” said Kamijou. “You mean the most dangerous ones are already gathering back here? But I don’t want to be stabbed by a flame sword and roasted just cause he’s mad!”

At any rate, he just had to do what he was told.

Kamijou kept by a corner of the wall and tried to look inconspicuous in an international airport full of English. Trying to travel alone overseas without a passport and without speaking English was beyond suicide.

And with the time this gave him, his thoughts turned back.

To that final moment.

Something had felt off.

Was Hamazura really the kind of person to choose death, leaving his girlfriend behind?

And when he looked up from the handgun, he hadn’t been looking at Kamijou rushing toward him.

The focus of his eyes had seemed odd.

Thinking back, Kamijou thought Hamazura had been looking a bit behind him.

And Hamazura’s lips had definitely moved. As if uttering a complaint.

“Are you…kidding me?”

A question remained.

The two of them had been alone on that spaceship, so what had Hamazura been looking at?

Afterword

If you picked them up one at a time, welcome back. If you bought them all at once, welcome.

This is Kamachi Kazuma.

Genesis Testament is already at Volume 15! And the third term has finally begun!! This one tells the story of the world after the battle against Great Demon Coronzon. Lola Stuart and Great Demon Coronzon were the same person, but Coronzon’s death makes it hard for the Anglican Church to release this information. A few matters related to them were left in limbo, so I introduced those things here to help tie up the loose ends. Narthex is the most obvious, but there are others, so you can search for them if you have some time.

Death doesn’t erase someone’s influence! …That feels like a large line drawn between the magic side and science side, but what did you all think?

This is a twisted world where everything is resolved through battle.

No one ever questioned it before because of the extreme tension of the ongoing countdown until doomsday. Everyone around Kamijou Touma was fighting with their adrenaline at full blast. In that sense, Hamazura Shiage only managed to start questioning it here because things had begun to calm down. You could even say it was evidence that Coronzon’s death had brought peace to the world and given everyone a chance to calm down and think. There isn’t room to punish war crimes during the life-or-death tension of war. …Although Hamazura himself would never accept that he had “calmed down” any.

Once you’re aware of how twisted a world it is, maybe you can see part of the reason Coronzon wanted so badly to create a world that is “only correct”.

Academy City had worn down its military might during the previous fighting, but quickly weaponizable civilian technology is a different matter. There’s no way Academy City wouldn’t have any weapons beyond the ones it had officially announced, right? So I used lasers, mass drivers, and the sort of thing this time. It’s fun to imagine Accelerator’s chagrin as each new one shows up!! …Maybe it would be easier to tear the entire city down and build a new one from the ground up, but as a criminal, he must want to transform Academy City into a safe and peaceful place. Besides, he’s in the process of atoning for his crimes, so it isn’t like he wants to take the easy road.

One of the reasons for Narthex’s rampage may have been that Coronzon didn’t call for her during that final battle. In fact, if she had stood by Coronzon’s side and used that sealing magic to its fullest, the battle over Adikalika may have turned out differently. Coronzon may have seen her as having insufficient safety controls compared to Index, unstable, troublesome, and a source of scandal. Or maybe her position as the unchosen version led Coronzon to see her as a precious sister who she wanted to keep far away from her path of evil and ruin. I hope you imagined how that hated woman reacted when the doll she created out of malice called her “mother”.

I find codes and seals to be a romantic part of the occult including the way the slightest thing can undo those things, so I made Narthex a specialist in that side of things. She’s a rival who approaches things from a different angle than Index who is a specialist in searching through the grimoires she has gathered as a library. So if you prefer the YF-23 to the F-23, or your heart races when you see anything about magic circles or sigils, the prima materia of alchemy, or the traditional elemental conversions made by adding or subtracting the hot, dry, cold, and wet, then I hope this got through to you!! I think if someone were to save Narthex, then that savior could become the protagonist of their own story in the same way Kamijou did by saving Index. …If she can be saved, that is. Facing that overpowered and stubborn girl head on and managing to save her would be enough to earn the title of a hero or fierce warrior!

By the way, Narthex’s sealing magic is more like Dion Fortune’s black box than it is Kamijou’s Imagine Breaker. Still, it is a fairly bizarre method of attack even when looking at the entire series. That right hand power’s previous bearer was gathering dust in the Golden cabal’s storage space. Dion Fortune also comes from there. …And more than that, Mathers summoned Coronzon over a century before to bring ruin to the Crowley family. If you consider where that bizarre thing originated, some things might come into view.

I give my thanks to my illustrators Haimura-san and Itou Tateki-san and my editors Miki-san, Anan-san, Nakajima-san, and Hamamura-san. She is linked to Coronzon and she acts as a contrast to Index, so designing Narthex couldn’t have been easy. And then there’s District 23! All the backgrounds have to be full of strange things!! …Sorry for all the trouble. Thank you yet again.

And I give my thanks to the readers. I like weird vehicles like cranes and loaders, but I really like weird aircraft too. I poured that love into this book, but what did you think!? Thank you so much for reading this far.

It is time to close the pages for now while praying that the pages of the next book will be opened.

And I lay my pen down for now.

It hit harder because he lost, didn’t it?

-Kamachi Kazuma

Prev	[v d e]Toaru Majutsu no Index: Genesis Testament GT Volume 1 Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword GT Volume 2 Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword - Ending GT Volume 3 Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword - Ending GT Volume 4 Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword - Ending GT Volume 5 Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword - Ending GT Volume 6 Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword GT Volume 7 Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword - Ending GT Volume 8 Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword - Ending GT Volume 9 Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword - Ending GT Volume 10 Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword - Ending GT Volume 11 Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword - Ending GT Volume 12 Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword - Ending GT Volume 13 Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword GT Volume 14 Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword - Ending GT Volume 15 Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword [v d e]Side Stories Volume SP Illustrations - Stiyl Magnus - Mark Space - Kamijou Touma - Uiharu Kazari - Afterword Railgun SS1 Illustrations - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5 - Chapter 6 - Chapter 7 - Chapter 8 Kanzaki SS Illustrations - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5 - Chapter 6 - Chapter 7 - Chapter 8 Railgun SS2 Illustrations - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5 - Chapter 6 - Chapter 7 - Chapter 8 Road to Endymion Illustrations - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5 Necessarius SS Illustrations - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5 - Chapter 6 - Chapter 7 - Chapter 8 Virtual-On Illustrations - Preface - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword Railgun SS3 Illustrations - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5 - Chapter 6 - Chapter 7 - Chapter 8 Biohacker SS Illustrations - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5 - Chapter 6 Agnese SS Illustrations - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5 - Chapter 6 - Chapter 7 - Chapter 8 Railgun LN Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword Item LN Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword - Ending Item LN 2 Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword - Ending Item LN 3 Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword - Ending Item LN 4 Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword - Ending Item LN 5 Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword - Ending Item LN 6 Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword - Ending Mikoto vs Misaki Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5 - Chapter 6 - Chapter 7 - Epilogue Mikoto vs Misaki 2 Prologue - Depth 8 - Depth 7 - Depth 6 - Depth 5 - Depth 4 - Depth 3 - Depth 2 - Depth 1 - Epilogue - Ending Toaru Kagaku no Railgun: Cold Game Toaru Jihanki no Fanfare Toaru Majutsu No Index: Love Letter SS Toaru Kagaku no Railgun SS: A Superfluous Story, or A Certain Incident’s End Toaru Majutsu no Index: New Testament SS Toaru Majutsu no Index: Shokuhou Misaki Figurine SS Toaru Majutsu no Index: A Certain Midsummer Return to the Starting Point Toaru Majutsu no Index: Using Final Bosses to Determine a Sociological Threat Toaru Majutsu no Index: New Testament Bonus Short Story Toaru Majutsu no Index: Thus Spoke the Kumokawa Sisters Toaru Majutsu no Virtual-On: Vooster's Cup, The Day Before Toaru Majutsu no Virtual-On: Misaka Mikoto's Dangerous Tea Party Toaru Majutsu no Index: Birthday Through the Glass Toaru Majutsu no Index: New Testament 20 Bonus Short Story Toaru Majutsu no Index: Misaka Mikoto’s Teamwork A Certain Magical Index: Genesis Testament SS A Certain Scientific Mental Out: The Queen’s Play A Certain Magical Index: Genesis Testament SS2 [v d e]Official Parody Stories A Certain Prophecy Index A Certain Academy Index A Certain Gift Exchange A Certain March 201st Novel I Don't Want This First Story of A Certain Magical Index!! or I Don't Want This Final Story An All-In "World" Tour of Academy City, the 37th Mobile Maintenance Battalion, and Ground's Nir Kamijou-san, Two Idiots, Jinnai Shinobu, Gray Pig, and Freedom Award 903, Listen Up! …Fall Asleep and You Die, But Not From the Cold☆ We Tried Having a Group Blind Date, but It was an All Stars Affair and a World Crisis Will the Spiky-Haired Idiot See a Piping Hot Dream of His Wife? Dengeki Island: A Girl’s Battle (Still Growing) Kamijou Touma Visits Another World Toaru Majutsu no Index X Apocalypse Witch Crossover SS Toaru Majutsu no Index X Apocalypse Witch X Heavy Object Crossover SS I Still Want to Do a Summer Fair A Certain Collaboration Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 Kamachi Crossover Illustrations - Preface - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - A.E. 02 - Afterword Durarara Crossover Preface - Academy City Chapter - Ikebukuro Chapter	Next